Remarkable Creatures (3 page)

We also grew used to the smaller social circle of Lyme. It is a solitary place—the nearest city of any size is Exeter, twenty-five miles to the west. As a result its residents, while conforming to the social expectations of the time, are peculiar and unpredictable. They can be small-minded, yet tolerant as well. It is not surprising that there are several Dissenting sects in the town. Of course the main church, St. Michael’s, is still the Church of England, but there are other chapels too that serve those who question the traditional doctrine: Methodists, Baptists, Quakers, Congregationalists.

I found a few new friends in Lyme, but it was more the stubborn spirit of the place as a whole that appealed to me than specific people—until I got to know Mary Anning, that is. To the town we Philpots were for years considered London transplants, to be viewed with some suspicion and a little indulgence too. We were not well off—£150 per annum does not allow three spinsters many treats—but we were certainly better off than many in Lyme, and our background as educated Londoners from a solicitor’s family brought us a degree of respect. That we all three were without men I am sure gave people plenty of mirth, but at least they aimed their smirks at our backs rather than our faces.

Although Morley Cottage was unremarkable, it did offer stupendous views of Lyme Bay and the string of eastern hills along the coast, punctuated by the highest peak, Golden Cap, and ending, on clear days, with the Isle of Portland lurking off land like a crocodile, submerged but for its long flat head. I often rose early and sat at the window with my tea, watching the sun rise and give Golden Cap its name, and the sight softened the sting I still felt at having moved to this remote, shabby watering hole on England’s southwest coast, far from the busy, vital world of London. When the sun drenched the hills, I felt I could accept and even benefit from our isolation here. When it was cloudy, however, blowing a gale or simply a monotonous gray, I despaired.

We had not long been installed in Morley Cottage before I grew certain that fossils were to be my passion. For I had to find a passion: I was twenty-five years old, unlikely ever to marry, and in need of a hobby to fill my days. It is so tedious being a lady sometimes.

My sisters had already claimed their territories. Louise was on her hands and knees in the Silver Street garden, pulling up hydrangeas, which she thought vulgar. Margaret was indulging her love of cards and dancing at Lyme’s Assembly Rooms. She persuaded Louise and me to go with her whenever she could, though she soon found younger accomplices. There is nothing to put off potential suitors more than old spinster sisters in the background, making dry remarks behind their gloves. Margaret had just turned nineteen, and still had great hopes for her prospects at the Assembly Rooms, though she did complain of the provincial quality of the dancing and frocks.

For myself, it took only the early discovery of a golden ammonite, glittering on the beach between Lyme and Charmouth, for me to succumb to the seductive thrill of finding unexpected treasure. I began frequenting the beaches more and more, though at the time few women took an interest in fossils. It was seen as an unladylike pursuit, dirty and mysterious. I didn’t mind. There was no one I wanted to impress with my femininity.

Certainly fossils are a peculiar pleasure. They do not appeal to everyone, for they are the remains of creatures. If you think on it too much, you would wonder at holding in your hands a long dead body. Then too, they are not of this world, but from a past very difficult to imagine. That is why I am drawn to them, but also why I prefer to collect fossilized fish, with their striking patterns of scales and fins, for they resemble fish we eat every Friday, and so seem more a part of the present.

It was fossils that first brought me in contact with Mary Anning and her family. I had hardly collected a handful of specimens before I decided I needed a cabinet in which to display them properly. I have always been the organizer amongst the Philpots—the arranger of Louise’s flowers in vases, the one to set out the china Margaret brought from London. This need to put things in order led me to Richard Anning’s cellar workshop in Cockmoile Square at the bottom of the town. Square is far too grand a word for the tiny open space about the size of a good family’s drawing room. Though just around the corner from the town’s main square, where fashionable folk went, Cockmoile Square was made up of shabby houses where tradesmen lived and worked. One corner of the square held the town’s tiny jail, with stocks sitting out front.

Though Richard Anning had been recommended to me as a decent cabinetmaker, I would soon have been drawn there anyway, if only to compare my fossils with those at the table young Mary Anning tended outside the workshop. She was a tall, lean child, with the hard limbs of a girl used to working rather than playing with her dollies. She had a rather plain, flat face, made interesting by bold brown eyes like pebbles. As I approached, she was sifting through a basket of specimens, picking out pieces of ammonites and tossing them into different bowls as if playing a game. Even at that early age she was able to tell apart the various types of ammonites by comparing the suture lines around their spiraled bodies. She glanced up from her sorting, her look spirited and full of curiosity. “You want to buy curies, ma’am? We got some nice ones here. Look, here’s a pretty sea lily, only a crown.” She held up a beautiful piece of crinoid, its long fronds spread out indeed like a lily. I do not like lilies. I find their sweet scent too cloying and prefer sharper scents: I have Bessy dry my sheets on the rosemary bush in Morley Cottage’s garden, while she hangs my sisters’ over lavender. “Do you like it, ma’am—miss?” Mary persisted.

I flinched. Was it so very obvious that I was not married? Of course it was. For one thing, I had no husband with me, looking after and indulging me. But there was something else about married women that I noticed, their solid smugness at not having to worry about the course of their future. Married women were set like jelly in a mold, whereas spinsters like me were formless and unpredictable.

I patted my basket. “I have my own fossils, thank you. I am here to see your father. Is he in?”

Mary nodded towards steps that led down to an open door. I ducked into a dim, filthy room crammed with wood and stone, the floor covered with shavings and gritty stone dust. It smelled so strongly of varnish that I almost backed out, but I could not, for Richard Anning was staring at me, his sharp, shapely nose pinning me to the spot like a dart. I never like people who lead with their noses: They pull everything to the center of their faces, and I feel trapped by their concentration.

He was a lithe man of medium height, with dark lustrous hair and a strong jaw. His eyes were the kind of dark blue that hides things. It always annoyed me how handsome he was, given his harsh, teasing nature and his sometimes rough manners. He had not passed on his looks to his daughter, who might have had more use for them.

He was perched over a small cabinet with glass doors, holding a brush coated with varnish. I took against Richard Anning from the start because he did not even set down the brush, and barely glanced at my specimens as I described what I wanted. “A guinea,” he announced.

It was an outrageous figure for a specimen cabinet. Did he think he could take advantage of a London spinster? Perhaps he thought I was well off. For a moment, as I glared at his handsome face, I considered waiting for my brother to deal with him when he next came down from London. But that could be many months, and besides, I could not rely on my brother for everything. I was going to have to make my way in Lyme without the tradesmen laughing behind my back.

It was clear to me from looking around his shop that Richard Anning needed the business. I should use that to my advantage. “It is a pity that you have suggested such an exorbitant sum,” I said, wrapping my fossils in muslin and placing them back in my basket. “I would have made your name prominent on each case, and everyone who looked at my collection would have seen it. Now, however, I shall have to go elsewhere, to someone more reasonable.”

“You going to show
them
to others?” Richard Anning nodded at my basket, his incredulity deciding me: I would find someone in Axminster, or even Exeter if I had to, rather than give this man my business. I knew I would never like him.

“Good day to you, sir,” I said, turning to sweep up the steps. I was thwarted in my dramatic departure, however, by Mary, standing square in the entrance and blocking my way. “What curies you got?” she demanded, her eyes on my basket.

“Clearly nothing that would be of interest to you,” I muttered, pushing past her and out to the square. I hated being stung by Richard Anning’s tone. Why should I care for a cabinetmaker’s opinion? In truth, I’d thought my bits and pieces rather fine, for someone new to finding fossils. I had found a complete ammonite, as well as parts of several others, and the long shaft of a belemnite, the pointed tip intact rather than broken, as they so often are. Now I could see, even as I passed the Annings’ table in my anger, that their fossils far exceeded mine in both variety and beauty. They were whole, polished, varied, and abundant. There were specimens displayed on the table I hadn’t even known were fossils: bivalves of sorts, a heart-shaped rock with a pattern on it, a creature with five long waving arms.

Mary had ignored my rude remark and followed me out. “You got any verteberries?”

I paused, my back to her, the table, the whole wretched workshop. “What is a verteberry?”

I heard a rustling by the table, the clinking of stones knocked together. “From a crocodile’s back,” Mary said. “Some say they’re the teeth, but Pa and I know better. See?”

I turned to look at the stone she held out. It was about the size of a twopence coin, though thicker, and round but with squared-off sides. Its surface was concave, the center nipped in as if someone had pressed it between two fingers while it was soft. I recalled the skeleton of a lizard I’d seen at the British Museum.

“A vertebra,” I corrected, holding the stone in my hand. “That is what you mean. But there are no crocodiles in England.”

Mary shrugged. “Just not seen ’em. Perhaps they’ve gone somewhere else. Like to Scotland.”

I could not help smiling.

When I went to hand back the vertebra, Mary glanced around to see where her father was. “Keep it,” she whispered.

“Thank you. What is your name?”

“Mary.”

“That is very kind of you, Mary Anning. I shall treasure it.”

I did treasure it. It was the first fossil I put in my cabinet.

It is funny now to think of that, our first meeting. I would never have guessed then that I would come to care about Mary more than anyone other than my sisters. How can a twenty-five-year-old middle-class lady think of friendship with a young working girl? Yet even then, there was something about her that drew me in. We shared an interest in fossils, of course, but it was more than that. Even when she was just a girl, Mary led with her eyes, and I wanted to learn how to do so myself.

 

 

 

MARY CAME TO SEE us a few days later, having discovered where we lived. It is not hard to find anyone in Lyme Regis—there are only a few streets. She appeared at the back door as Louise and I were in the kitchen, picking the stems off the elderflowers we’d just gathered to make into a cordial. Margaret was practicing a dance step around the table while trying to persuade us to make the flowers into champagne instead—though she did not offer to help, which might have made me more amenable to her suggestion. Because of her clatter and chatter we did not at first notice young Mary leaning against the door frame. It was Bessy, huffing into the kitchen with the sugar we’d sent her to get at the shops, who saw her first. “Who’s that, then? Get away from there, girl!” she cried, puffing out her doughy cheeks.

Bessy had accompanied us from London and relished complaining about her revised situation: the steep climb from the town to Morley Cottage; the sharp sea breeze that made her chesty; the impenetrable accent of the locals she met at the Shambles; the Lyme Bay crabs that brought her out in a rash. While Bessy had been a seemingly quiet, solid girl in Bloomsbury, Lyme brought out in her a bullishness she expressed with her cheeks. Behind her back we Philpots laughed at her complaints, though at times it brought us close to giving her notice as well, when she wasn’t threatening to leave.

Mary didn’t budge from the doorsill, Bessy’s temperament having no effect. “What you making?”

“Elderflower cordial,” I replied.

“Elderflower
champagne
,” Margaret corrected, with an accompanying flourish of her hand.

“Never had that,” Mary said, eyeing the lacy flower heads and sniffing at the muscat bloom that filled the room.

“There is such an abundance of elderflowers here in June,” Margaret said. “You should be making things out of them. Isn’t that what country folk do?”

I winced at my sister’s patronizing words. But Mary didn’t seem offended. Instead her eyes followed Margaret, who was now spinning about the room in a waltz, dipping her head over one shoulder, then the other, twisting her hands in time to her humming.

Lord help her, I thought, the girl is going to admire the silliest of us. “What is it, Mary?” I did not mean to sound so short.

Mary Anning turned to me, though her eyes kept darting back to Margaret. “Pa sent me to say he’ll make the cabinet for a pound.”

“Will he, now?” I had gone off the idea of the cabinet if it was to be made by Richard Anning. “Tell him I will think on it.”

“Who is our visitor, Elizabeth?” Louise asked, her fingers still in the elderflowers.

“This is Mary Anning, the cabinetmaker’s daughter.”

At the name, Bessy turned from the table, where she was turning out a fruitcake she had left to cool. She gaped at Mary. “You the lightning girl?”