The Coral Thief
Authors: Rebecca Stott
ALSO BY REBECCA STOTT
Ghostwalk
To Jacob
Once grant that species [of] one genus may pass into
each other … & [the] whole fabric totters & falls.
—C
HARLES
D
ARWIN,
Notebook C
, 1838
HEN AT THE AGE OF TWENTY-ONE
I traveled to Paris from Edinburgh by mail coach, carrying in my luggage fossils and the bone of a mammoth, I still believed time traveled in straight lines. It was July 1815, only a few weeks after Napoleon had been defeated by the Allies at Waterloo. War with France was over, restitution had begun, the borders were open again. Time stretched out like a long road in front of me—toward a vocation. I was to be a man of science, assistant to the illustrious Baron Georges Cuvier, professor of comparative anatomy at the Jardin des Plantes in Paris.
But fortunately for the man—or boy—who imagines he is heading in a straight line toward an illustrious future, there are highwaymen on the road, brigands in the trees, there are ambushes and skirmishes and falls to be had. If he takes a single step off the road into the undergrowth, where branchings and forkings chance along a different axis, he might begin to see the sublime contingency that is at the root of everything. He might find a different set of answers there.
And so it was that, with a night ambush on a mail coach, my voyage of discovery began. I was just one of scores of medical students traveling to Paris that summer.
She could have chosen any of us. But she chose me.
1
N THE DARK HOURS
of a hot July night in 1815, sitting on the outside of a mail coach a few miles from Paris, I woke to the sound of a woman’s voice, speaking in French, deep and roughly textured, like limestone. We had stopped outside a village inn whose sign creaked in the night wind.
Attention
, she said to the driver.
Be careful
.
I opened my eyes as a tall figure, her head obscured by the hood of her cloak, climbed into the seat beside me. Groaning with the effort, the driver passed up to her a large bundle wrapped in a red velvet blanket. It was a sleeping child; I could just make out a dimpled hand, the sleep-hot flush of a cheek, and a curl of dark hair. The woman spoke softly to the child, soothing it, rearranging the folds of its blanket.
“There are several empty seats inside, madame,” I said in French, concentrating hard on my pronunciation.
She answered me in perfect English: “But who would want to sit inside on a night like this?”
Her voice was surprisingly low for a woman, and it stirred me. The black of the sky was already shading to a deep inky blue over toward the horizon. Mist hung over the fields and hedgerows and gathered a little in the trees on either side of the road.
“Is it safe in France for a woman to travel alone?” I asked as the coach lurched back into movement. The Edinburgh newspapers regularly reported attacks on carriages traveling at night across open country.
She laughed and turned toward me, her face illuminated by the light of a half-moon. Over to my left somewhere a rooster crowed; we must have been passing a farm or a village. “But I am not traveling alone,” she said, dropping her voice to a whisper and leaning toward me. “I have Delphine. She is no ordinary child, you see. She is asleep now, of course, so it may be a little difficult for you to believe, but this child, she can fight armies and slay dragons. I have seen it with my own eyes. I have seen her lift an elephant and its rider with a single hand.
Non
, I am entirely safe with Delphine. Otherwise, of course, I would never travel alone. It is far too dangerous. What about you, monsieur? Are
you
not afraid?”
“I—”
“No, of course you are not afraid.” She smiled. “You are a man.”
“I have never left England before,” I stammered. “I have never traveled so far or had to make myself understood in another language. Three times I decided I must take the next mail coach back to Calais … I’ve never felt so much of a coward.”
She laughed, her voice mesmerizing in the darkness. “There it is. Paris. See the lights ahead … on the horizon? We will be there by dawn. Imagine …” She stopped suddenly, gazing out toward the flattened shapes of the distant hills. “Sometimes it’s easier to see all that water in the darkness.”
“I can’t see any water,” I said, confused.
She pointed from right to left. “Everything you see from there to there, the entire Paris basin, was under water thousands of years ago.
Paris was just a hollow in the seafloor then. There were cliffs of chalk over there, see, where the land began. Picture it—giant sea lizards swimming around us, oysters and corals beneath us, creatures with bodies so strange we couldn’t possibly imagine them crawling across the seabed. Later, when the water retreated, the creatures pulled themselves onto the rocks to make new bodies with scales and fur and feathers. Mammoths wandered down from the hills to drink from the Seine, under the same moon as this one, calling to one another.”
“That’s a strange thing to think about,” I said.
“Oui.”
She laughed. “I suppose it is. But I think about it often, this earth before man. I look at the fossils in the rocks, the remains of that time so long ago, and I think about how late we came. Even the sea slugs appeared before we did. It took thousands of years for these bodies of ours to take shape, for our clever eyes and our curious brains to come to be. And now that we are big and strong, we think everything belongs to us, that we know and own everything.”
“Come to be?”
I said, surprised and a little alarmed. “So you think species have changed? You are a student of Professor Lamarck, the transformist?”
“I was once,” she said. “Lamarck is right about most things. Species are not fixed. Everything is changing, all the time. The animals, the people, the hills—even the little things, skin, hair, everything is constantly renewing itself, taking new shapes. Just think of what we have come from—simple sea creatures with no eyes or hearts or minds—then think of what we might yet become. Doesn’t that excite you?” She ran her fingers across the child’s face. She—Delphine, the dragonslayer—stirred, her eyes flickering open for a moment and then closing again.
“Paris is riddled with infidels,” Professor Jameson had warned me back in Edinburgh. “They are poets, these French transformists, not men of science. They dream up notions about the origins of the earth and the transmutation of species. Castles in the air. Most of them are atheists too—heretics. Steer clear.”
Jameson had not mentioned that there were women who had
studied with Lamarck. I wondered what he would make of this infidel sitting beside me now. I would have to record this conversation in my notebook, I thought; Jameson would want a report. He would want to know the kind of words she used, what she had read, whom she talked to. So did I.