Curiosity Page 2

  Mary sat and watched her father as he took up the second drawer and began to fit it together. He was working from the light of the window, which showed the sky in three rows of its panes, and then the sea. In the soft sawdust on the floorboards, she could see his footprints like the tracks of animals on the shore. This was a collecting cupboard he was making, with shallow drawers for the curiosities. For the rich, who could afford to horde what the Annings must sell. It was a strange passion with the high-born, filling their drawing rooms with thunderbolts and snakestones, although they could buy all the china figurines they chose. Richard was lining up the dovetails, bracing the drawer on the workbench. He needed a helper. But he’d apprenticed Joseph to Armstrong the upholsterer on Dorcas Lane. I’ve enough aggravation in my day, he said when Molly argued about it. Armstrong can have the thin-faced nessel-tripe and welcome to him.

  Mary stood up. “I’ll brace it,” she said.

  “No,” he said. “Ye’ve not the meat on your bones to hold it steady.”

  So then Mary’s anger swelled up and sealed her mouth shut, then she could not tell him. About the strangeness of the man, the way he’d sorted the curiosities according to the names he gave them, shoving the carved snakestones to the side as worthless. The way he’d tried to speak to her as though she were a child, and how she’d shown him. “Last time I was at Lyme,” he said, “I ran into an antique fellow wandering the shore with a staff in one hand. On the search for the creatures he’d refused onto the ark.”

  Mary had stood up to her full height and declined to smile. “Noah,” she’d said.

  “It was, lass,” said the man, regarding her with surprise. “I’ve been burning to know if these cliffs were here before the Flood. But he wouldn’t put his mind to the question. Shun the sea, he cried. He shook his staff at me. Water, water, everywhere and not a drop to drink! He had only two teeth left in his head, the sorry old codger.”

  “But it were rain that made the Flood,” Mary said. “He could have drunk rainwater.”

  The man had laughed, high colour rising in his cheeks. “Sharp as a blade,” he’d cried.

  Richard was fixing a handle to the second drawer of the collecting cupboard. He moved to the shelf for his screwdriver. His back was turned fully to the window and his face was erased by its glare. Something stirred in Mary at the sight of his bony form looming large and black against the glass. Then he stepped away from the light and she could see his face again (intent and inward, with no thought of her upon it at all). “Any trade off the coach?” he asked.

  “Not off the coach.” She paused, and then she finally said it. “A man came on a horse and bought seven curios.” She reached into her waistcoat pocket and took out the coins.

  Her father’s black eyebrows lifted and she caught the gleam of his approval as she opened the lid of the box and dropped the coins in. Then he turned back to the cupboard. “The Philpot dames have spoke for this cabinet,” he said. “Pick out a beauty snakestone. We’ll put it in the top drawer to start them off.”

  The Philpot dames! Miss Elizabeth Philpot always smiled kindly at Mary and was a healer in her own way, with a salve she offered anyone who came with a wound to her door. There were three sisters, but it was Miss Elizabeth Philpot who loved the curiosities, although she would not go down to the shore to collect. Mary ran upstairs to the tray she had left in the kitchen and picked out the best pyrite ammonite, one Joseph hadn’t yet got his hands on, and slipped it into her pocket.

  As Mary carried the curiosity tray down to the workshop, Molly called and reminded her to go for water. Almost no one was out on the street – it was the afternoon lull. Broad Street rose up between proud shops and houses, and Mary climbed quickly towards the spring, wondering where the man with the blue bag was lodging. If he was lodging in Lyme at all. She could not determine where this man fit. He wore a top hat like a gentleman, but also a robe like an apothecary. He spoke like a gentleman, but he carried a dirty cloth bag. The degrees of the poor Mary could tell at a glance, but she was not skilled in the degrees of the rich. The degrees of the poor were the artisan, the servant, the labourer, the working poor fallen on hard times, and the true pauper (who had never been anything but). So three full degrees lay between a cabinetmaker’s daughter like Mary and the pitiful Dick Mutch lying in the stocks, although the high-born coming off the coach made no distinction between them at all. But Miss Philpot did, and it seemed this gentleman did as well. Mary thought of the familiar yet courteous way he’d spoken to her. As she climbed Broad Street swinging the bucket, she went over their entire exchange.

  “Where did you find this gryphaea, lass?” he’d asked, looking at her with pale, protruding eyes.

  “The Devil’s toenail, sir?” Mary said. “On the Devil’s beach.” It was Monmouth Beach she meant.

  “The Devil’s toenail?” he said fiercely. “The Devil’s beach? Where did you get such notions? Our Lord made everything that is.”

  How startled Mary had been at that – startled to her core! As though the man had peered into her head and pounced on what he’d seen there, a question that troubled Mary constantly. Everything you saw was made by man or God or the Devil; even Lizzie would have been able to tell you that. As Mary walked, she noted the handiwork of man on either side: the shops and houses built of brick and thatch, the window in the millinery shop that reflected back her bonneted head, the ordure floating in the sluice lake along the border of the street. But here and there, the hand of God broke through – in the green moss growing along the rim of the sluice lake, and the wisteria drooping purple on the kitchen walls at the backs of the houses. God also made the brambles that climbed up and choked the wisteria, and the stones that sprouted in the farmers’ fields, and the weeds growing up around the stones, and the pox. It was here the question grew perplexing. Some of God’s works were to serve man and some were to test him and punish him. So how could you be certain where the works of God ended and the works of the Devil began?

  Mary veered off Broad Street then, still carrying the bucket. She took a detour to the meadow on Pound Street and, stopping at the edge of it, looked down on the town. All the world she knew lay below her. More than her world – to the east, you could see the Isle of Portland, so far away that Mary had no expectation of ever setting foot upon it in her life. To the west lay Monmouth Beach, exposed now by the outgoing tide. In counting up the handiworks of the Devil, Mary always named Monmouth Beach (over which a mist of wickedness hung even now, from the smugglers working that shore, and from her own sister Martha wailing in terror while the tide washed her around the point to her death). And of course the Devil made the dragons that lived at one time in the cliffs and gave their shape to the cliffs, the shape of their bodies curled up in a lair. So, if the Devil made the dragons, it seemed reasonable that he’d made the cliffs, and certainly Black Ven, glooming over the shore to the east between Lyme Regis and Charmouth.

  But with an air of authority as grand as a king’s, this gentleman had given it all to God!

  Mary stood a minute longer, looking down at the calm sea. The lopsided moon was floating above it. That moon was wizening – the tides would be slack next week. Then she turned back up towards the spring.

  She was glad she’d not told her father about the conversation with the stranger. He’d have pinned a sneering name on the man. Her father took pride in scorning what others esteemed. A thought that had flickered in her mind when she saw Richard at the window came to her now: he had never had the pox, her father. But nor had he taken the cure at Ware Manor Farm. He is a history and a mystery, she said to herself.

  But so was she! She thought of the moment the man had trotted into the square. It was his horse she’d noted first, a big-jointed mare of striking ugliness. The man was not looking in her direction at all – he seemed intent on going down to the shore – but Mary had called as loud as a costermonger, “Curiosities!” With no sign from its rider, the horse had stopped abruptly and dropped its head, moving loose l
ips over the cobbles in search of an errant stalk of hay, and the gentleman had had no choice but to swing off and come towards the table. Why had Mary (who never cried out) cried out so suddenly at the sight of him?

  But what especially chawed at her mind and would not let it go was this: that the man had looked at the curiosities without surprise. Not as curiosities, but as something known, calling each by name, wrapping each one carefully in a separate cloth from his blue bag. All with a bustling and a business-like air, as though he had come into town expecting and prepared to meet Mary Anning.

  TWO

  towpath runs along the Thames all the way to London. The officer cadets at Great Marlow always talk about it. When they’re homesick, when they’ve been singled out by the captain and cruelly flogged, they lie in the barracks and talk bitterly about taking the towpath to London. And now Henry De la Beche is taking it. He’s been walking the towpath for hours, starving, stinking, limping from the lash, talking out loud from time to time like a lunatic. When barges glide silently past him going in the opposite direction, he squeezes himself into the bushes to let the donkeys plod by, warmed by their salty heat.

  The whole day, Henry has felt like an actor who walked offstage in the middle of a play. The aborted scene began in the guardhouse at Great Marlow, with the entrance of the guard. Instead of picking up the pail of night soil, he scolded the three of them to their feet. It was the little subaltern with iron cleats nailed to his heels. The courtyard was empty when he led them out – all the other cadets would be at matins. Henry stole a glance back at Wyndham and Chorley, but neither would meet his eye. They were all moving cautiously, the slashes on their buttocks and thighs from their flogging just starting to stiffen.

  At the officers’ quarters, the subaltern pounded on the first door, but no one came. Henry knew this to be the door of their victim, Master Truepenny, the history master, who, in spite of being a civilian of dubious social rank, had been offered accommodations among the officers. After a second round of pounding and shouting, the subaltern opened the door a foot and they all looked in at the overly neat sitting room and the cold hearth. Henry had never seen inside before and he was surprised at the humbleness of it, the plain wooden chairs. He had pictured cheap and showy furniture, evidence of Truepenny’s low and aspiring character. “Bullocks,” said the subaltern. He turned his eyes on them, calculating, and then he asked them to give their word that they would not stir until he came back. Henry was the first to offer it. On my word of honour, he said. “On my word of honour,” said his two co-conspirators in unison. They all three saluted.

  When the footsteps had died out, Henry said, “It’s rather touching, under the circumstances. His faith in us.”

  Something flared in Wyndham’s face. “My word still means something,” he said. He was bigger than Henry and a little older. He was the second son of the Earl of Egremont, who came to Marlow on parade day and stood by the field and jeered when his son fell out of step. Wyndham had a clumsy way of talking and moving, but he was not as stupid as people thought. As for Chorley, he just stood there with his chin jutted out. Both of them blamed Henry for getting caught. They were never truly my friends, he thought in that moment.

  “Well, give my regards to Truepenny, will you?” he said, and he turned towards the archway. He had an instant’s impression of their faces, astonishment reshaping them. He walked quickly down the corridor, resisting the temptation to run. A path led down to the river, and with a quick look around him, he darted into it.

  Fifteen miles up the towpath, he’s still hectically rewriting that scene. Picking his way around donkey dung, he writes in new characters (his mother, Mr. Truepenny, his dead father standing remote and watchful), he tests out various parting lines, adds an ironic salute in the archway. The sun sinks below the line of trees on the far bank and the drama lurches on without any prompting from him. Henry’s hunger has taken over, and the pain in his buttocks and back. At Cookham, he climbs up to the town. His pockets are empty. He had close to two pounds left for this quarter, but they took his wallet away when they dragged him to the guardhouse.

  A girl stands at a brazier selling roasted potatoes and he leans on a wall across the lane and watches, longing to beg from her. She’s gradually overtaken by the shadow of the shop behind her, and then all he can see is an orange nimbus from the invisible charcoal fire. Then it’s dark enough to steal, so he drops back to the river where cottages line the towpath. In rooms so dim they might be lit by glow-worms, the poor bend over their suppers. Henry creeps between two cottages and waves a boot experimentally over the earth. Even in daylight, would he recognize food in a kitchen garden? Carrots and swedes – they grow below the ground. He drops to his knees and feels around in the autumn-shrivelled leaves, digging his fingers in, finding nothing but stringy roots. Back down at the river, empty-handed, he crouches as low as he can on his bruised thighs and laps water with his palm.

  For the first time, he wonders what Wyndham and Chorley have endured that day. It’s possible they were flogged again, for his escape. It would be absurd, but not outside the daily absurdity of Great Marlow. “The subject who is truly loyal will never advise nor submit to arbitrary measures.” He copied that once from a book at his uncle’s. It would mean nothing to Wyndham and Chorley. Insubordination was the charge against all three of them, but really, it was fitting that he alone was singled out to be expelled, because the other two never challenged anything; they were just in the scheme for the profit. Chorley was an atavistic little merchant, about two generations from a barrow-monger, but Wyndham had more complicated sources of misery and need. Lord Egremont kept his son destitute as a matter of principle. The flogging and the guardhouse were nothing compared to what Wyndham would suffer at his father’s hands, and Henry felt a stab of guilt because he had known from the beginning that they’d be caught, that the scheme was meaningless unless Mr. Truepenny saw the drawings and knew who had made them. In the place in his chest where he’s carried that sweet satisfaction, Henry feels shards of emotion gathering, a stirring that he recalls (from the distant days before Marlow) as tears. Why should I have stayed for more humiliation? he says fiercely to himself. The writ was signed. Marlow had expelled him; it had no more rights over him.

  The towpath ends at the foot of Cookham Bridge – it must resume on the other side. A smell of cut hay rises from the fields. A hayfield would be a fragrant bed, but the thought of lying on the ground brings up childhood memories of Jamaica, of serpents slithering through grass. Instead, he climbs over a wall into a yard and eases himself down on a bench. Lying flat on his back with his knees up, he feels the pain less. Something (roses?) climbs the wall opposite him, although by the smell of rust and iron he would say he was in a smithy. A lopsided moon perches on the roof-edge. He wonders sleepily if it’s waxing or waning. The phases of the moon will matter to him now, in his new vagabond life. (“On your honour,” says the subaltern with the iron cleats. “It’s rather touching, his faith in us” – this time he gives that line to Wyndham. “No,” Henry answers. “It’s just Marlow – they never see what anything really means.” His mother bends towards the roses, snipping off faded blossoms. “They never see the meaning of anything,” he explains to her. “They’re stupid, shrivelled, small-minded old fools.” “Oh, my darling boy,” she says, straightening up and reaching her gloved fingers out to touch his face.)

  When he wakes, the sun is rising over the wall and the sky is the blue of an enamel bowl. The play is over, his mind is scrubbed clean. Dew furs the wool of his breeches. He was right – it’s a smithy’s yard he’s lying in. What he took for climbing roses is a tangle of rusting wire and pig iron tossed against the wall. A hen picks its way through the dirt and flaps to the window above him, settling onto the ledge. He rolls gingerly onto his side. Lying on the bench with his arm bent under his ear, he listens to the carts go by on the road. I’ll go into the city, he thinks. I’ll go to Clement’s, he’ll feed me. He reaches down to brush at his
breeches and the wool turns wet against his skin.

  It’s mid-afternoon before he comes up on Hampton. He’d thought to take the towpath all the way to Westminster Bridge, but he’d be days following the wanderings of the river. He turns up the first major thoroughfare he comes to – Talgarth Road, someone tells him – and walks into the clamour of London. Darkness falls and the gaslights glow green in the east. He saw them the year before, when he was on Christmas leave and stayed at his uncle’s. Afterwards, it seemed likely he’d embellished them, confused them with the light from a dream. But apparently not. There’s the first one on a pole, a fabulous stemmed flower dropping its secretive light on an ordinary patch of pavement, showing the dark up for what it is.

  A half-hour later, he emerges from the shadows at his uncle’s club. Boodle’s squats yellowly under a gas lamp with saddle horses and tilburies crowding the pavement in front. If Henry goes in, there’ll be a plate of oysters and a cab ride the rest of the way, Uncle Clement taking him confidingly by the arm, telling about driving drunk through Covent Garden in 1794, being arrested for shouting, “Liberty while you live,” from the window of a carriage, oh, the rake he was! Henry’s hunger carries him up to the door and then carries him right on past, keeps him on a giddy trajectory up St. James Street. A boy holds out a man’s hat to beg. He’s in red knee breeches, his feet and legs bare. Henry touches his pocket to say, empty.

  Then he’s on Piccadilly, and then it’s another mile or more and he’s at his uncle’s corner and his uncle is descending a cab. “The young cadet,” Clement says, without surprise and with something like pleasure, giving a mocking salute. Henry moves towards him, trying to walk normally. He nods to the doorman, takes in the smell of cigars in the hall, and follows his uncle up the stairs. The false calves sewn into Clement’s hose are turned slightly awry.