9

A USEFUL FRIEND

After that, Henry often brought buns with him on our expeditions, wrapped up in a twist of paper. Sometimes I pretended not to be at all interested for I could not have him think that I was like some stray dog to be tamed with a scrap of food, but then he would sit on a rock and lick the sugar off slowly, as I had wanted to do, while laughing at me as I tried to ignore him.

‘Come on, Mary. I know you are a proud one, but Cook made these for you,’ he said, holding out one of the sugary temptations.

It is a hard thing to be hungry, to feel your stomach seemingly try to eat itself, but you can get used to it. You have to, or all you’d do is think about food all day, which would be of no use whatsoever.

I took the bun. He smiled. I had found out for myself how powerful it felt to be able to feed others but I did not like him to have that power over me and I did not thank him for the bun, which was very bad manners.

‘I do know that I am very fortunate, Mary, and that much of my good fortune was an accident of birth.’ Henry was looking at me in that ‘please like me’ way he had.

‘Some accident,’ I muttered, my mouth full of bun.

‘And I know that you are proud and don’t like anyone to feel sorry for you, just as you do not feel sorry for others,’ he continued.

I licked my lips. ‘I do feel sorry for people who suffer hardship when it is not of their own doing. There are plenty of those in Lyme. Fishermen who have lost fingers when they got caught in the nets, sailors with legs blown off by Frenchies, orphaned children,’ I replied. ‘I feel no such sorrow for people with more money than sense or who needlessly put their lives in danger, like those fools who go in the winter sea or try to clamber about these cliffs with no knowledge.’

‘But you put yourself in danger, Mary,’ said Henry. ‘Must I have no sympathy for you if you are crushed in a mudslide or swept out to sea? I might not be there to save you next time!’

I smiled at his talk of saving me. Because he had done so the once, he seemed to think he would do so again, but I was able to look after myself and it was only because I had been distracted by him walking away, crying, that I had missed the signs.

‘No sympathy for me, thank you!’ said I. ‘You may feel sorry for yourself for missing an adventure, but don’t ever feel sorry for me! I know what I am doing!’

And with that I jumped up and set about cracking open a pile of rocks. Henry laughed and started to do the same, only his were all empty, as I knew they would be.

I did know what I was doing. I knew when and where to go along the coast. I could tell, mostly, which stones had curiosities in them and which did not. I was learning every day how to read the sea and her moods and I was a demon, though I say it myself, at haggling with the customers. That was something neither Joseph nor Henry could do well at all, even though they vied with each other and thought I did not notice. Joseph was stubborn about prices and made people lose patience and walk away. Henry just smiled at them and took the first offer they made, so I told him he could have no part in selling since he cost us money with his ‘How-do-you-dos’ and flattery and general lack of a nose for making money.

Most of the time, Joseph seemed to pretend Henry wasn’t even there, but he often made remarks behind his back about his rank or clothes or abilities. Then, one day, as Henry fiddled about with the setting out of the curiosities on the stall, he spoke straight to him.

‘I suppose you be too grand for trade,’ he observed, and even I could hear the sneer in his voice.

‘You may be right, Joseph,’ Henry answered very calmly. ‘I do not think I have found my métier.’

‘Your whattier?’ I asked, for that was a word I had never heard before.

‘My métier... the thing I should be doing to make my way in the world. It’s a French word. Sorry!’

‘Ha! Always knew you were a Frenchie!’ I said, but I was only teasing him and he knew it.

‘Well,’ said Joseph, moving everything on the table back to how it had been before Henry had rearranged it, ‘there you have it. It’s not your met-ee-ay, Frenchie.’

Henry looked like a kicked dog but he did not bite back. He just saluted me and walked away.

‘That was rude,’ I said.

‘Well, he’s of no use to us, Mary. You must see that.’ Joseph’s face had gone very red.

‘He’s of use to me!’ I retorted. ‘He is company on my excursions and carries my finds.’ I nearly added that he brought me buns but decided that was best kept quiet as it would be another reason to make Joseph cross.

‘Well, how very pleasant for him that he does not have to work for a living. Unlike some of us. Used to be just me and you, Mary, thick as thieves. Now I am nothing but a pig in the middle.’

So, it was jealousy.

‘There is nothing to stop you coming out with us of an evening!’ I said.

‘When I am weary from a day’s labour?’ he replied.

There is no pleasing some people.

 

Mother had a saying: ‘No good deed goes unpunished’. She was right. The next three evenings, Joseph came too, and we got less work done than if it were just me on my own, for the boys argued and bickered and tried to outdo each other with the size of rock they’d attempt to move or the steepness of the cliff they’d try to climb.

I found all this very dull and annoying for they were very noisy at the same time, squawking away like gulls fighting over a bit of bread. Why do boys have to show off as if they are cockerels in a hen house? Tis easy to see why there be so many wars, with them so anxious to scrap with their own kind it’s hardly surprising that they rush to pick fights with folk who are different.

Why, even I have been learned to be afear’d of the French with all the tales of what they do to prisoners and how they eat all manner of disgusting things like frogs’ legs and snails. But then I got to thinking that they might be very poor and starving, even. Or maybe they just like eating them. After all, we eat whelks and cockles and what are they but snails of the sea? I couldn’t eat a frog’s leg, however hungry I felt. I was certain of that.

All the same, I prayed that Henry and Joseph were not called away to fight at sea, however much they seemed keen to fight on land, Joseph being the worse of the two for getting his fists out. When Joseph heard someone say that there were press gangs up the coast in Weymouth looking for poor souls to go and fight Napoleon, Mother forbade him to go out of the house for fear he’d be snatched and taken off for a Navy man. She knew that if they got him, they’d return him broken and useless or, worse, she’d never see him again alive. It was no adventure for a common sailor. No doubt it was different for the officers in all their finery and with all the money they made from the spoils of war. Anyway, Joseph was safe for the press gangs never came to Lyme and for that I was very glad.

I must admit that I was mightily relieved when Joseph tired of our company and decided to go fishing in the evenings instead. Peace and quiet returned.

I have always liked it to be quiet. Sometimes, when I am very intent on winkling out some curio or ferreting about in the mud for signs of something worth digging out, I find even the slap of the waves on the shore irritating. Inside my head there is so much questioning and enquiring. It’s as if I have got lots of extra Mary Annings running about in my brain, thinking and spying and wondering and trying to work things out and if any other sounds get in, it sends all those Marys quite mad. It sounds strange, I know, but that is how it is and just one tiny squeak can be too much when I am concentrating.

Sometimes, I concentrated so hard that I was in another world entirely and time passed without me even noticing. I forgot everything. I forgot to be hungry or thirsty (which is good as there was nothing to eat or drink unless Henry brought it) and I forgot about having a piss, so that when I got home I had to rush to find the chamber pot because I was bursting fuller than the biggest flagon you could ever imagine. I know that is not ladylike, but I am trying to explain how it was for me and besides, I am no lady, as well you know by now.

That was one good thing about Henry. He learned my funny ways and he changed his ways to suit mine. He would like to hum while he made his drawings but that was something I couldn’t abide. When first he did it, bumbling away like a bee on a buttercup, I looked at him with the most foul face I could muster. Then I threw mud at him and then I went and thumped him soundly and that stopped him. After that, I had only to look at him with what he called ‘the evil eye’ and he would stop his buzzing instantly, and after a while he never did it any more, so long as we were alone. When Joseph was there too, all my rules were disregarded and it fair made my head boil so that I was driven to move as far away from them as I could.

So, as long as I could keep Joseph and Henry apart that long summer, I preferred Henry to be with me. For the fact was, Henry really was very useful. He could draw a thing so that it almost looked real. He took out a measure and wrote down exactly how big the item was and made sure his drawing matched that faithfully. He said it was ‘scientific’ (a word I pretended not to hear) and that we must keep a proper record of all that we had found and where we had found it.

It was very useful when he made a drawing of a particular spot on the cliff so that we could find it again if we needed to when we returned. Usually I remembered exactly where I had left something interesting but, of course, the sea, the wind and the rain could rearrange things so that all looked different, even in the summer. Unless there had been a terrible storm or a big landslip, the top of the cliff stayed constant, so Henry looked for a landmark, like a tree or an odd-shaped bush or rock and sketched it and wrote little notes like ‘three paces along from this’. And that’s where he would mark down an arrow pointing to the drawing of the crooked tree or the rock that looked like a face or whatever thing had caught his eye as a clue.

He was teaching me to draw too, and to label things. It pleased me to see his drawings, so plain and so clear. He called them sketches but I called mine scratches because the pen nib made a scratching noise as I wrote and caught on the paper, near enough ripping it like a cat’s claw. I wished I could write as fair as he did, but I had not had the learning nor the practice so I had to do the best I could and try to get better.

When we had had a good day, there was nothing that pleased me more than when we sat down to go through all we had found and sort them into their kind and make a record of their number and size.

‘What do you think these really are?’ Henry asked me one day as we stood in the shallows, washing the mud off the curios. I looked at the objects he had in his hand.

‘Devil’s toenails and Devil’s fingers of course! You know that!’ I wondered at him asking such a question after all this time. He must have made drawings of twenty or thirty, maybe more.

‘But they aren’t, are they? Devil’s toenails and fingers. I mean, how many toes does the Devil have, if any? Doesn’t the Devil have a cloven hoof, like a goat? So what are they? Have you ever seen creatures like this alive?’

‘I know they aren’t toenails... but they do have a look of a toenail and the fancy folk do love to think they have the Devil’s toe clippings in their hands. You must have marked how the ladies scream and wrinkle up their noses! They find delight in being disgusted, seems to me! And the fingers, dark as they be, are more like to be the finger of a devil than a lady.’

‘Yes, I know,’ said Henry. ‘But we need to be more scientific! What are they? The toenails look to me like oysters or mussels but they are not the same as either. They resemble them but no more. Have you ever seen an oyster like this in all your days in Lyme? No! And neither have I! This is some ancient creature, dead for years and years!’

‘We’d get no money for an old oyster. You do understand how trade works by now, don’t you?’ I asked.

‘I do, but I also understand that you have a strong liking for truth, Mary, and I should think you would want to know what a thing really was and not to sell it as something it is not. And these’ – he held up more of the Devil’s toenails – ‘are not toenails and these’ – he pointed to the sorted heaps on the ground – ‘are not serpents or ladies’ fingers or crocodile teeth, are they? So what are they? And where are they now? The living ones, I mean.’

These were questions I had asked myself so many times and I felt pleased and cross that Henry was asking them too; pleased because we thought alike, but cross because I had never spoken of these mysteries before and Henry might think I was copying him.

He stared at me intently, awaiting my answer, but I did not know what to say for my head went suddenly empty and then very full again with all sorts of ideas and notions, none of which I could get hold of for long enough to give it words.

He sighed. ‘You are right, though. People want to believe what they want to believe; but we, Mary, we are going to be scientists and we will make studies and work out just what these things really are and what they mean about all of this!’ He swung around, pointing at the sea, the sky and the cliff. ‘What they mean about life and this Earth.’

Scientists! A word not to be said out loud. A word and a notion as bad as any talk of the Devil and yet, alongside the shiver of fear at its mention, I felt a flicker of a flame leap in my chest and there was a moment of white light in my head, as if the lightning was striking me a second time. Henry must have seen something in my face, for he smiled.

‘Aha! I see you understand me, Mary. Here. Let’s make a pact. Let us promise that we will be scientists – secret scientists, if you prefer – and solve these mysteries together! You have a genius for finding the evidence, while I have a modest talent for recording it. Together, our two brains can fathom out what all of this means. Do I have your promise?’

He stretched out his hand (not so white as once it was) and I shook it. I felt his determination in that firm grip and I squeezed his hand back hard as I could to show him mine. Scientists! We were to be secret scientists!