Remarkable Creatures (7 page)

We would see Captain Cury from time to time upon beach, but until Miss Elizabeth come to Lyme, the shore were deserted of other cury hunters apart from us. Mostly I went looking with Joe or with Pa. Sometimes, though, I went down upon beach with Fanny Miller. She was the same age as me and lived just up the river from Lyme, past the cloth factory, in what we called Jeri cho. Her father was a woodcutter who sold wood to Pa, her mam worked at the factory, and the Millers were members like us of the Congregationalist Chapel in Coombe Street. Lyme was full of Dissenters, though it had a proper church too, St. Michael’s, that was always trying to lure us back. We Annings wouldn’t go, though—we were proud to think differently from the traditional Church of England, even if I couldn’t really say what those differences were.

Fanny was a pretty thing, small and fair-haired and delicate, with blue eyes I envied. We used to play finger games during Sunday services when it got dull, and would run up and down the river chasing sticks and leaves we’d made into boats, or picking watercress. Though Fanny always preferred the river, sometimes she would go with me upon beach between Lyme and Charmouth, though she would never go as far as Black Ven, for she thought the cliff there looked evil and stones would tumble down on her head. We would build villages from pebbles, or fill in the holes tiny clams called piddocks made in the rock ledges. At the same time I would keep an eye out for curies, so it was never just play for me.

Fanny had the eye but hated to use it. She loved pretty things: chunks of milky quartz, striped pebbles, knobs of fool’s good. Her jewels, she called them. She would find these treasures, yet wouldn’t touch good ammos and bellies even when she knew I wanted them. They scared her. “I don’t like them,” she would say with a shiver, but could never explain why, other than to say, “They’re ugly,” if I pressed her, or, “Mam says they’re from the fairies.” She said a sea urchin was a fairy loaf, which was their bread, and if you kept it on a shelf your milk wouldn’t go sour. I told her what Pa taught me: that ammos were snakes that had lost their heads, that bellies were thunderbolts God had thrown down, that gryphies were the Devil’s own toenails. That scared her even more. I knew they were just stories. If the Devil really shed that many toenails, he would have to have had thousands of feet. And if lightning was to create that many bellies, it would be striking all day long. But Fanny couldn’t think like that and would hold on to her fear. I’ve met plenty of others the same—frightened of what they don’t understand.

But I loved Fanny, she being my one true friend then. Our family weren’t popular in Lyme, for people thought Pa’s interest in fossils odd. Even Mam did, though she would defend him if she heard talk about him at the Shambles or outside chapel.

Fanny did not remain my friend, though, no matter how many jewels I brought back for her from the beach. It weren’t just that the Millers were suspicious of fossils; they were suspicious of me too, especially once I started helping the Philpots, who people in town made fun of as the London ladies too peculiar even to get a Lyme man. Fanny would never come if I was going upon beach with Miss Elizabeth. She got more and more funny with me, making comments about Miss Elizabeth’s bony face and Miss Margaret’s silly turbans, and pointing out holes in my boots and clay under my nails. I begun to wonder if she were my friend after all.

Then when we did go along the shore one day, Fanny were so sullen that I let us get cut off by the tide, as a punishment for her mood. When she saw the last strip of sand next to the cliff disappear under a foamy wave, Fanny begun to cry. “What we going to do?” she kept sobbing.

I watched, with no desire to comfort her. “We can wade through the water or climb up to the cliff path,” I said. “You choose.” Myself, I did not want to wade a quarter of a mile along the cliff to the point where the town begun on higher ground. The water was freezing and the sea rough, and I could not swim, but I did not tell her that.

Fanny gazed equally fearfully at the churning sea and the steep climb we faced. “I cannot choose,” she squealed. “I cannot!”

I let her cry a little more, then led her up the rough path, pulling and pushing her to the top where the cliff path goes between Charmouth and Lyme. Once she’d recovered, Fanny would not look at me, and when we neared the town she run off, and I did not try to catch her up. I had never been cruel to anyone and did not like myself for it. But it was the start of the feeling I had ever after that I did not entirely belong to the people I ought to in Lyme. Whenever I run into Fanny Miller—at Chapel, on Broad Street, along the river—her big blue eyes turned hard like ice covering a puddle, and she talked about me behind her hand with her new friends. I felt even more like an outsider.

OUR TROUBLES TRULY BEGUN when I was eleven and we lost Pa. Some says it were his own fault for taking a bad tumble one night coming back to Lyme along the cliff path. He swore he’d had no drink, but of course we could all smell it. He was lucky he weren’t killed going over, but he was laid up for months. He couldn’t make cabinets, and the curies Joe and I found only brought in a bit, so the debt he had already got us into become much worse. Mam said the fall weakened him so that he couldn’t fight the illness when it come a few months later.

I was sad to lose him, but I had no time to dwell on it, for he left us with such debts and not a shilling in our pockets, me and Joe and Mam, and her carrying a baby born a month after we buried Pa. Joe and I had to hold her up and almost carry her into the Coombe Street chapel for the funeral. Between us we got her there, but we were a sight, staggering in with Mam to a funeral we couldn’t even pay for. They had to take up a collection in the town, and most showed up, to see what it was they had bought.

Afterwards we put Mam to bed and I went out upon beach, as I did most days, funeral or no, though I did wait till Mam were asleep. It would upset her if she knew where I was going. To her, Pa’s falling off the cliff when he should have been in his workshop were just proof from God that we shouldn’t have spent so much time on curies.

I walked towards Charmouth, an eye on the tide, which was coming in now but slow enough that I wouldn’t get caught out yet. I got past Church Cliffs and the narrow bit where the beach curves round and then widens out, with Black Ven hanging above, gray and brown and green stripes of rock and grass like the coat of a tabby cat, slipping down gradual rather than like the sheer face of Church Cliffs. Mud from the Blue Lias oozes onto the beach there and deposits treasures for those willing to dig through it.

I searched the clay, just as I had for so many years with Pa. It were a comfort, hunting by the cliffs. I could forget he was gone, and think that if I just looked round he’d be behind me, bent over stones or poking at a seam of rock in the cliff with his stick, working in his own world while I worked in mine. Of course he weren’t there that day, nor any day after, no matter how many times I looked up to catch sight of him.

I found nothing in the Blue Lias but shards of bellies, which I kept even though they were worthless with the tip broke off. Visitors only want to buy long bellies, preferably with the tip intact. But once I’ve picked something up it’s hard to drop it again.

In the rocks, though, I discovered a complete unbroken ammonite. It fitted perfectly in my palm, and I closed my fingers over it and squeezed it. I wanted to show it to someone—like secrets, you always do want to show your finds, to make them real. But Pa—who would have known how hard it was to find such a perfect ammo—Pa weren’t there. I shut my eyes to stop the tears. I wanted to keep that ammo in my hand always, squeezing it and thinking of Pa.

“Hello, Mary.” Elizabeth Philpot was standing over me, dark against the gray light of the sky. “I didn’t expect to find you out here today.”

I couldn’t see her expression, and wondered what she thought of me being upon beach rather than at home, comforting Mam.

“What have you found?”

I scrambled to my feet and held out the ammo. Miss Elizabeth took it. “Ah, a lovely one.
Liparoceras
, is it?” Miss Elizabeth liked to use what she called the Linnaean names. Sometimes I thought she did it to show off. “The points on the ribs are all intact, aren’t they? Where did you find it?”

I gestured to the rocks at our feet.

“Don’t forget to write down where you found it, which layer of rock and the date. It is important to record it.” Since I’d learned to read and write at chapel Sunday school, Miss Elizabeth was always nagging me to make labels. She glanced down the beach. “Will the tide cut us off, do you think?”

“We’ve a few minutes, ma’am. I’ll turn back soon.”

Miss Elizabeth nodded, knowing that I would prefer to walk back on my own rather than with her. She took no offense—hunters often like to be alone. “Oh, Mary,” she said as she turned to go. “My sisters and I are all very sorry about your father. I will come by tomorrow. Bessy has made a pie, Louise a tonic for your mother, and Margaret has knitted a scarf.”

“That be kind,” I mumbled. I wanted to ask what use scarves and tonics were to us now, when we needed coal or bread or money. But the Philpots had always been good to me, and I knew better than to complain.

A gust blew the rim of Miss Elizabeth’s bonnet so that it turned inside out. She pushed it back and wrapped her shawl close, then frowned. “Where’s your coat, girl? It’s cold to be out without.”

I shrugged. “I’m not cold.” In fact, I
was
cold, though I hadn’t noticed till she said so. I’d forgot my coat, which was too small for me anyway, for it held my arms back when I need them to be free. I weren’t thinking about coats that day.

I waited until Miss Elizabeth had got to the curve in the deserted beach before I made my own way back, still squeezing the ammo. The line of her straight back far ahead kept me company and was a comfort of sorts. Only when I reached Lyme did I see anyone else. A group of Londoners in town for the last of the season were strolling by Gun Cliff at the back of our house. As I slipped past them, a lady called to me, “Find anything?”

Without thinking I opened my hand. She gasped and caught up the ammo to show the others, who stopped to admire it. “I’ll give you half a crown for it, girl.” The lady handed the ammo to one of the men and opened a purse. I wanted to say it weren’t for sale, that it was mine to help me remember Pa by, but she’d already put the coin in my hand and turned away. I stared at the money and thought, “Here is a week’s bread. It’ll keep us from the workhouse.” Pa would’ve wanted that.

I hurried home, squeezing that coin tight. It was proof that we could still make a business out of the curies.

 

 

 

MAM NO LONGER COMPLAINED about our hunting. She didn’t have time to: By the time she recovered from the shock of Pa’s death, the baby were born, which she called Richard after Pa. Like all the past babies, this one were a cryer. He was never very well, and nor was Mam; she was cold and tired, with baby not sleeping well and feeding badly.

It were baby’s crying—that and the debt—that sent Joe out into the bitter cold he hated, one day a few months after Pa’s death. We needed fossils. I wanted to go out too, even with the cold, but I was stuck indoors, jiggling baby about to stop his crying. He was such a squally little thing it was hard to like him. The only thing that shut him up was when I held him tight and jiggled him and sang “Don’t Let Me Die an Old Maid” over and over.

I was just singing the last lines for the sixth time—“Come old or come young, come foolish or witty/Don’t let me die an old maid, but take me for pity”—when Joe come in, banging the door back so I jumped. A bank of cold air hit me and started baby crying again. “Look what you done!” I shouted. “He was just quieting and you gone and woke him.”

Joe shut the door and turned back to me. That’s when I saw that he was excited. Usually nothing stirs my brother—he has a face like a rock, with little expression or change. Now, though, his brown eyes were lit like the sun shone through them, his cheeks were red, his mouth was open. He snatched his cap off and rumpled his hair so that it stood straight up.

“What is it, Joe?” I said. “Oh, hush, baby, hush!” I put baby over my shoulder. “What is it?”

“I found something.”

“What? Show me.” I looked to see what he was holding.

“You have to come out. It’s in the cliff. It’s big.”

“Where?”

“The end of Church Cliffs.”

“What is it?”

“Don’t know. Something—different. Long jaw, lots of teeth.” Joe looked almost scared.

“It’s a crocodile,” I declared. “It must be.”

“Come and see.”

“Can’t—what would I do with baby?”

“Bring him with.”

“Can’t do that—it’s too cold.”

“What about leaving him next door?”

I shook my head. “They done too much for us already—we can’t ask them again, not for something like this.” Our neighbors in Cockmoile Square were wary of curies. They envied us the little money we made from them, while also asking why anyone would want to part with even a penny for a bit of stone. I knew we had to ask for their help only when we really needed them.