18

WOULD IT PAY TO BE PATIENT?

Joseph was back at work so he had no choice but to entrust me with digging the skull out of the rock. He made a very great fuss in front of Mother about allowing me to ‘share in the glory’ and how kind he was being letting me take over after he had shown me where to look. Piffle! The fact was that I knew where to look myself and he was too lazy to do the extraction work himself and it didn’t interest him in the least in any event. Not that I was unhappy, mind. It suited me down to the ground.

For the first time in her life, Mother wanted to come out with me onto Black Ven. It was not what I wanted at all but she would not take no for an answer. I walked ahead of her as fast as I could, ignoring her calls to slow down or to help her when the ground was difficult to cross.

To be fair, Mother was struck dumb at the sight of the monster. She ran a finger round the eye socket and poked at the teeth. Then, before I knew what she was doing, she took a chisel out of her apron and began trying to extract the beast from its prison of rock, as I suppose she must have seen Father do some time in days gone by. I watched her for a minute or two and then I could stand it no longer.

‘No!’ I growled, snatching the chisel from her. ‘You’ll smash the bone or split the rock! Leave it. It will take weeks to do it properly. Father took nearly a month to free a big snakestone and he knew what he was doing. You do not!’

‘You mind your manners, young woman!’ Mother was in a fury, but I did not care for I was in a bigger fury than she, not least because I was torn in two. I wanted to start my search for the rest of the body, but it was clear that Mother could not be trusted to be left alone with the head.

‘Well, do not ruin the best treasure that we have ever found, then!’ I retorted. ‘Leave me be. I know what I am doing!’

She put her face close to mine. ‘We need the money this could fetch, Mary. Surely I do not have to remind you? And do not forget, either, that this could keep you out of a scullery.’ Her tone was threatening, but all it did was irritate me more. She’d seen the monster. Now why didn’t she just go?

‘I know that, thank you, but I will wager that a whole monster is worth a good deal more than part of a monster. Besides, you will get nothing for it before Easter.’

‘There’s no arguing with you, Mary, is there? You always know best, seemingly!’ She dusted her hands violently on her skirt. ‘Well, I suppose there is no harm in waiting since, as you say, there’ll be no buyers this month or next. You, or rather Joseph’ – at this, I pulled a face. I could not help it – ‘found it quickly enough. So I am sure the rest will follow in short order. Just remember, time is passing.’

And with that, she turned and set off for home. Good riddance! This was my domain, not hers. Mine and Father’s.

I suddenly felt very alone. As a rule, I like to be alone. I was glad that Joseph was not with me, not because I did not want him to find any further pieces of the monster... well, maybe a bit because of that... but because I could concentrate without distraction. Yet under the dark grey sky, in the cutting wind, on the beach beside all the mud and rubble, I felt utterly alone.

A pain shot through my chest. Father! I wanted my father. I wanted him to be there, to tell me what to do next, to protect me and, yes, to praise me and encourage me. After all, I was only here because of him. If he had made me bide at home with Mother when I was a young child, I might have been sewing or cooking now. I might have been looking after the babies. I laughed to myself at this notion. I knew well enough that that would never have happened. One way or another, I would have been here, Father or no Father.

But could I really do this all alone?

I did not like this feeling of doubt. I had never felt I could not do something. I always, always believed I could. Mother called that being stubborn. Father said it was just me being his little Lightning Mary. Where was my lightning now?

I sat on one of the slabs and took the book out of my bag. Why it was called ‘Illustrations’ I could not fathom, because there weren’t any, only hundreds and thousands of difficult words. It seemed the book was about another book which had been so difficult for anyone to understand that Mr Playfair had tried to make it simpler. It was far from simple to me and I doubted I should ever read it all, but I realised that it was enough just to have it with me. It was a scientific work and I was a scientist. Henry believed that. I must believe that. I put it back in my bag.

The creature must have died where it lay for its jaws were complete. By rights, the whole skeleton should be close by. I’d found a rat last winter, frozen to death in the snow, and had hidden it in the graveyard on an untended grave so that I could observe how long it took to turn into a skeleton.

It took much longer than I expected. No other creature seemed to want to eat it and it only really began to decay when the weather got warmer and the flies and maggots came. The skeleton was not picked clean until July. The jaw fell off and all the little bones separated, but it still looked just like a rat. Its teeth and claws and tail were almost the same as in life and even though birds and mice and other rats came and went, it had not been moved. I remembered that Mrs Stock had told me that her cat (the nasty Zebediah) bit the heads off mice, ate all of the body except the stomach and crunched up their little bones as if they were no more than blades of grass. Mrs Stock would come down in the morning to find a head in the scullery, feet in the kitchen and a tiny, nasty, green stomach in the hall.

The monster, the crocodile, had been dead for much, much longer than my rat or any of Zebediah’s mice. I could only hope that it had not been killed by something in the way Zebediah killed his prey, or who knows where the bones might be scattered. I shivered to think how big a beast would have to be to behead mine. Zebediah was five times the size of a mouse! No use in imagining that monster, though. I had to concentrate on the job in front of me and hope that the body was close by. I needed something to prove that there would be more to find.

I started work on the slab where Joseph had found the head, painstakingly scraping at the mud and rock, chiselling in to lever off the slices. It was slow progress. How had Joseph been so lucky? He had barely had to work at all!

My hands were beginning to numb, but I worked on until I could no longer hold my tools, then I used my fingers, gritting my teeth at the pain as my nails broke and one even tore off. It must be here! It must! Otherwise . . .

The cliff seemed to lean towards me, blotting out the light. The sea was dark and restless, the tide creeping in.

I just needed a sign that I was looking in the right place, but no. All I found was mud, shale, oyster and mussel shells, roots from a tree torn down long ago.

I was exhausted and my hands were bleeding and filthy. I dabbled them in the shallows and felt the salty water sting my fingertips and sear into the flesh where the nail had been. ‘Be brave, Mary,’ I told myself. ‘It will all be worthwhile in the end.’

I decided to make one last attempt before setting off for home and the explanation that must be made for my failure.

I tugged a section of slab loose and struck it hard along a seam. It fell in two.

At first it seemed there was nothing – but then I saw it. A dull little piece of grey matter. I thought at first that it might be a tooth but when I pulled it out, it was something very different. A round bone, like an apple with the middle spooned out with three pieces coming off one side of it – two like a stubby wing and one pointing straight up like a fin with a hole through the point where they joined. My back ached as I stood up and I rubbed the nape of my neck. My fingers ran over the nobbled bone and I smiled. The head had been attached when it died, for here was the start of its neck.

Where there was a head and a neck, a body should soon follow. There was one difficulty, though. The unexamined slab was no more than a foot long. It was impossible that it contained the whole creature. That meant only one thing.

I looked up at the cliff. It was going to be very difficult to get to the place whence the landfall had come. Difficult and dangerous. The slide had created an overhang but it was that overhang which almost certainly shielded the rest of the beast. How to reach it? If I worked under it and it came loose, I would be crushed. If I worked above it, it would surely collapse even under my small weight and I would fall twenty or thirty feet. Such a fall would most likely maim me. Or kill me.

Well. That was a problem for tomorrow. I had one final task before the sun sank too low.

I had tucked my last piece of paper into the pages of the geology book. I laid the neck bone next to the head and began to make a careful drawing, just as Henry had shown me. Then I wrote ‘Skull of a monstrous crocodile found by Joseph Anning under my instruction and verteberry found by me. Sorry about the blood ’, folded it up neatly and addressed it to Henry. I put the neck bone in my bag and headed for the town.

‘Your brother is going with Nathaniel to fetch the monster,’ Mother told me when I got home. ‘We cannot risk anyone else finding it. Besides, if it is to take you so long to make it ready for sale, it’s better that you do so here. And, no, Mary, I won’t touch it! You have made it perfectly plain that I am not as skilled as you.’

Joseph and his friend Nathaniel must have had quite some labours to fetch it from the cliff, for they were red in the face and sweating when they arrived at Cockmoile Square with Nathaniel’s wheelbarrow groaning under its load. It took all four of us to manhandle it up the steps into the house where we set it down in the middle of the kitchen floor.

That night, Mother gave us a bit of tallow so that we could have some light as we started the long task of removing all the stone from around the skull and she gave it to us so willingly that I understood her reasoning only too well. I made heavy weather of the task, for the longer I could delay the selling of the skull, the more chance I had of finding the rest of the creature in the cliff.

Mother was not so easily fooled. ‘Seems to me, Mary, that you are in no great haste to free that beast,’ she remarked, one eyebrow raised.

‘I have my reasons,’ I replied stoutly. ‘See this?’ I showed her the neck bone.

‘That does not look much like a treasure to me,’ she said, turning it over to examine it.

‘That, Mother, is proof that the rest of the body is there and I mean to find it. I must find it. You must be patient.’

And I must fathom out a way to find it even though it was in a place I could barely see, much less reach. I could not tell her that.