Curiosity Read online

  As for Mary, when the tide was low she went collecting with her father, and when it was too high to walk the shore in safety, she went to chapel. She went with her mother or, if Percival was too fretful, she went alone or took Lizzie. She went out of sympathy for James Wheaton, the clever young pastor who had a clockwork spring inside him that pressed him into postures he would not have willed for himself. James Wheaton could not turn his queer white-fringed calf eyes on the congregation but must preach to the side window, and Mary thought she understood why: it was how fiercely he loved them and how mercilessly the Lord’s words gripped him.

  They were almost at the Cobb, and Mary could sense Walter Jones still watching from behind. No one knew what to do with her father. They looked at him the way she did, with the same bewilderment and longing. He should have been hanged for starting a bread riot in the Year of Our Lord 1800, when Mary was just a baby, a year the crop withered in the fields and the price of a bushel of corn went up to nineteen shillings. But he was not hanged. The army spent a month trying to ferret out the leader of the riot, beating the townspeople and offering them bribes, but there was not a single crimp among them, they were solid against the soldiers. And they did not hate Richard for it – they loved him for the way he taught them their rights and led them up the streets to the mill, with torches burning in the dark, crying, “Bread or blood!” This was ten years ago and they still loved him for it.

  It was a book that made a rebel of him. For weeks, Holly said, he’d been reading an unlawful book by Mr. Thomas Paine. After the riot, when the soldiers filled the town, Molly built up a roaring fire and threw the book into it, and she always claimed she’d brought him out of a spell by burning it. The night after the army left, people were at the workshop again, wanting more riot. But standing in his doorway, Richard asked where it was written in Holy Scripture that the price of a bushel of corn was five shillings sixpence. He’d dropped them in it and then he acted as though he had no memory of it ever happening. Everyone retreated confused to the Three Cups and Richard went out and mended the cobblestone in the square, which lay a mudhole since they’d pried up stones to throw at the soldiers. He was the one who’d got their blood up and it was their blood that turned him against rioting. So Molly said. There was more grain strewn along the road those nights, she explained, than was ever carried home for the children.

  Mary glanced back and saw that Walter Jones was finally turning up to town. He had cast his head over his shoulder for one last look at Richard. In that look, she felt the pull of the chapel, as though James Wheaton or God himself had sent Walter Jones to summon them. Richard saw where Mary’s eyes had gone. “An hour in the chapel, the week with the Devil,” he said.

  Mary looked closely at her father’s thin face. We try to explain him, she thought, but he does not hold to reasons as other men do. His causes were wordless, sealed shiny and hard inside him. No one would ever hold him. He’d been a rebel and he rebelled against the rebels. He’d been a Dissenter and now he was a dissenter of the Dissenters and went to chapel no more. Walter Jones and all of them watched him in wonder – Richard Anning, misfortune’s favourite, walking boldly down to the shore on a Sabbath morning.

  It was a relief to encounter the plump spectre of Mr. Buckland on the shore, floating a foot or two above the shingle with his popping eyes fixed on the stones – Mr. Buckland, the man with the blue bag who had come to the curiosity table, who disputed the Devil’s hand on any living creature and said that what they called dragons were really just crocodiles, made by God and migrated now to warmer climes. He was lodging in town; they would often spy his big hairy-hocked horse munching weeds along the cliff. Mary was always startled at first by the sight of him drifting over the shingle in his gown and top hat. When you worked your way closer, you could see that he was attached to the earth; it was just that the bottom of his gown up to his knees was white with dust.

  He was a clergyman, she knew that now, and as soon as they were close enough, she called a greeting and asked him, “Be ye not in church this Sabbath morning?”

  “Of course I am,” he said. “And so are you. We’re worshipping in the Lord’s chapel.” And he gestured to the east, where mist veiled Black Ven and Golden Cap shone high above as though it dangled from the sun. He seemed to be addressing her, but really he was directing his cleverness to her father, darting eager smiles in Richard’s direction. “Here on this shore is all the bounty of the Lord made manifest,” he cried.

  “This shore?” Mary said. “But there were grand wickedness done on this shore.”

  “There’s been wickedness done on every shore of the seven seas,” said Mr. Buckland. “Man will use the earth for his purposes, for God gave him dominion.” Light sparkled silver off the edges of the black cliffs, and the sky was a high dome of blue over them, and it seemed that what Mr. Buckland said was true – Mary could hardly look at the shore for the beauty of it.

  The first time Mary and her father talked to Mr. Buckland at the shore, he’d tried to trick them. Richard asked him what he’d found that morning and he reached into his blue bag and showed them a Devil’s toenail sticking out of a bit of red shale.

  “What do ye take me for?” said Richard, passing it back. “You never found that on this shore.” The limestone and shale cliffs rose behind them, all blue-grey. The blue lias, people called it.

  Buckland laughed and confessed he’d bought it from the curi-man who stopped the coach on the Exeter Road. Mr. Buckland asked their names and he told them his, and explained that he was a clergyman and a scholar at Oxford University. “What age is the lass?” he asked.

  Mary told him she was eleven and asked with all courtesy, “And you, sir?” and Mr. Buckland and her father both laughed, but he did tell her. He was six-and-twenty. “Sharp as a blade!” he said, and now Mary, who was coming to know his tendency to reuse his words, did not put so much stock in it.

  “Ye’d not have said so, mind,” said Richard, “if ye’d seen her as a babe.” But Mary did not want to hear him tell the story of the lightning again, dwelling on her wondrous dullness, and she rushed in with a question: Could Mr. Buckland explain why the snakes had all curled up in the same attitude to die, so neatly, like the curled horns of a ram? For she’d seen more than one snake dead on the turnpike road and they were not curled tightly up but were laid out like whips.

  “Were the ammonites snakes at all?” Mr. Buckland asked. “By their form, you might conclude they were molluscs. You’ve seen a garden snail with its shell on its back?”

  “If they were like garden snails, how did they come to be stone?” she asked.

  “Ha!” said Mr. Buckland. “I could ask you the same question, if they were snakes.”

  “Saint Hilda turned them to stone,” Mary said. “When she started the convent at Whitby. She rolled them down a hill and their heads broke off.” But even as she said it, she saw the amused look on Mr. Buckland’s face and realized how very foolish this story was.

  Mr. Buckland asked her father then about the stony jaws often found on the shore. Crocodile jaws, he called them. He wanted a complete example that he could carry away to study.

  “You’d best ask at the quarry at Church Cliffs,” Richard said. “They’re grinding them up for lime morning and night.” Her father must have taken hard against Mr. Buckland to refuse such a chance.

  “I’d be prepared to pay handsomely,” Mr. Buckland said, and Mary studied his face, trying to gauge how many shillings handsomely might mean.

  “The lass with the anthracite eyes,” he called her. She asked him what anthracite was, and he said a kind of coal. Mr. Buckland was from another world; he’d been born in Axminster, six miles away. He did not know the Annings, the ill fortune they were marked out for, although the news of the first Mary’s death in a fire had been written up in the paper – not in Lyme (where they thought the tidings too dismal for Christmas) but in Bath. Molly had the newspaper, so old and dry and yellow that it was splitting at the folds. Sh
e kept it in the cupboard and, when she was in the mood to look at it, showed Mary, though neither of them could read it. Mary studied it, marvelling that the whole sad story was hidden in those tiny lines of print. Strangers in Bath had moved their eyes over it while their Christmas goose spit and dripped on the fire, and knew about the Annings. But that was long ago.

  Asking for salve was just a pretext to knock on the door of Morley Cottage that afternoon, for Mary’s arm was healed. All the same, Miss Elizabeth Philpot helped her hang her jacket on the back of a chair and roll up the sleeve of her grey dress. While Miss Philpot applied the salve, Mary told her a story about Mr. Buckland. Grey snakestones as big as cartwheels were bedded on the western shore, and Mr. Buckland had found a broken one with the centre whorls washed out of it. He hoisted it up and fitted it over his head like a ruff, and then he called to Mary, “How does my lady for this many a day?” The tide was coming in and he walked straight out onto the foreshore and disappeared around a point, wading ankle deep in water with the snakestone round his neck. Mary was worried he’d be caught by the tide, but all her father said was, “He’ll swim to France, the thin-faced martel.”

  Miss Philpot was daubing the salve delicately and without fear on Mary’s pox-marks. Her own cheeks were marred with scars (for the pox is not a respecter of persons). She had never asked where the marks had come from; it was not in the way of the highborn to ask. Or perhaps she had heard in the town. At chapel, the pastor had delivered a thundering sermon especially for the Annings, on the practice of mingling animal humours into human blood. A devilish cure, he called it. Why the Devil would choose to cure people was something no one explained.

  Miss Philpot listened to the story of Mr. Buckland with amusement. “A professor!” she said. “If he has survived, you must ask him what he thinks of the pig-faced lady.” And then, with great relish, she told Mary a story about the Philpot brother Charles, riding down a wide highway in the great city of London and seeing, in a carriage beside, a lady famously known in London as the pig-faced lady. There were many who had seen her, but no one knew her name or where she lived. She was thought to possess a fortune, but this was scant comfort to her. The day Charles saw her, she wore a veil, but it had got caught up on her snout. Charles Philpot saw her lift a graceful hand to fix it. A lady’s hand in a fine glove, not a pig’s trotter.

  “Gentlemen have been posting notices in the Times,” Miss Philpot said, her mouth turned down in the wry twist that passed for a smile, “offering themselves to the lady with the heavy facial affliction, as they delicately put it. For five thousand pounds per annum, they reckon they can stomach a bit of squealing at supper.”

  If the pig-faced lady did find a husband, Mary wondered, how would he bear to kiss her? If she’d had any thought of saying this aloud, Miss Philpot’s poor pox-fretted face stopped her before the words came out.

  “Oh, Catherine, Saint Catherine, please come to my aid, and grant that I niver may be a wold maid,” Mary said secretly to herself as she went out through the back garden, feeling a bit ashamed as she said it, because of the liking she had for Miss Philpot.

  The Philpot sisters had paid Richard a deposit for the cabinet and now, for the moment, there was money to spare and her mother knew it, but Richard took Joseph to the Three Cups for his supper that night and left her no chance to importune him about the seventh son. Long after Mary and Lizzie and their mother had retired, Richard and Joseph came clattering up to the bedchamber and laid themselves down in the dark, Joseph on a pallet on the far side of the bed. Murmuring voices started up from the bed.

  Lizzie, who was on a floor pallet beside Mary, was wakened by all the noise. “Mary,” she said, putting a hot hand on Mary’s cheek, “where did they cut you to put the pox in?” It was the question she asked almost every night.

  Mary wanted to hear her parents’ conversation. She pulled the cover over both her head and Lizzie’s. “Not in one place but in five,” she said fiercely. “Like our Lord Jesus Christ. Here –” She scratched at Lizzie’s palm, then she poked at Lizzie’s side and grabbed for Lizzie’s feet. “– and here, and here.” Lizzie began to cry and Mary clamped her hand over her mouth, but pips of sob escaped into the room.

  “Hush,” their father said, rising up in the bed. “You two hush yer moaning.”

  Finally it was quiet again, and then Molly asked Richard about taking Percival to Exeter.

  “It’s a big town, Exeter,” Richard said. “Where the devil does the lad dwell? Do ye have any notion?”

  Molly was silent.

  “Does Mrs. Stock have the name?”

  “I hate to ask her.” Mary could hear her mother turn over in bed. “She has a gloating way about her, does Mrs. Stock.”

  “A pullet with its legs tied together could gloat, if it cast for cause as wide as the Widow Stock does,” Richard said, turning over also.

  They would be lying close, with their legs bent to fit together. Mary heard them both sigh. There was a comfort in their sighs and their silence, and she wished she was small enough to climb into their bed and worm her way into the warm channel between them. She rolled over and tucked an arm under her head as a pillow. The day of the cowpox cure came vividly to her – she had begun to think of that day with a kind of joy. Walking out with her father and Joseph, and crossing a field where black-faced sheep with tattered coats stood to watch them. Seeing Ware Manor Farm, with geese running in a pack in the green yard, and the dead tree that stood with buckets hung upside down to dry on its limbs. It all came to her – Farmer Ware in his smock, walking between the barn and the dairy with stately step because of the yoke over his shoulders, the smell of manure in the cowshed, so strong it made her eyes burn, and her father lifting her up to a railing heedless of the muck that coated it. “Did ye ever see a poxy milkmaid?” he said, and he brought the tip of the sharp clasp knife to her forearm, and she kept her eyes on his and did not let out so much as a whimper.

  FOUR

  n hour out on the Great West Road, Henry is frantic with pain from his lacerated buttocks. He braces his boots against the floor of the bouncing coach and shifts his weight from one hip to the other, while Alger, sitting in the opposite corner, watches him suspiciously. His uncle insists on having the curtains pulled across; the light bothers his eyes. So there is not even the distraction of the road. They’re locked together in this dim box for three days of torment.

  Will I have scars? Henry wonders. Tallo, his nurse’s husband at Halse Hall, had cross-hatching on his back like woven wicker. Not from floggings at Halse Hall, from before that. In fact, he was sold to Halse Hall because of it, because if the back is thickly enough scarred, the slave becomes indifferent to the lash. So Henry’s mother said, in recounting how Henry’s father naively bought Tallo the week after arriving in Jamaica and thought he’d got a bargain. Not that Henry’s father intended to rely on the lash. It was 1799 when he took over the plantation – before the Wilberforce Bill banned the trade from Africa, but England was all talk of abolition and his father was resolved to be a different sort of planter. A short-lived intention, it would seem, because Henry can remember bare backs in the shed, hands bound to a hook high above. He can remember the sound of the lash, although not the sight of it reaching its mark; just Tomkin the overseer pausing to wipe sweat from his face and neck.

  And now I have been flogged, he says to himself as they bounce along the Great West Road. The part of his brain that was counting was stunned into silence at about three, but Chorley had reported fifteen lashes. Henry stuffs his jacket under him to augment the thin horsehair cushion, and perches gingerly on it, thinking about what lies ahead, living in disgrace in Bristol with this uncle with the skewed wig and a belly that joggles to the rhythm of the coach. They were identical twins, his father and Uncle Alger. His mother always asks, “When you see Algernon, do you remember your father?” and he says, “No, I remember Algernon.” Which is to say, between annual visits to Bristol, he forgets entirely what his uncle looks li
ke, and he denies any resemblance at all between them – his father, Lieutenant-Colonel Thomas De la Beche, a distinguished officer with the Norfolk Regiment of Fencible Cavalry, and this tedious, dyspeptic bachelor.

  Alger is drifting off to sleep now, his head tipped back against the cushions. Henry watches his mouth slacken and his head fall to the side. Finding himself suddenly in solitude, Henry opens the curtains a crack. He tries to keep his mind off his backside. He needs to focus on the inner meaning of his situation. The meaning no one will see, until he has the chance to share it with his mother. That he acted in truth against a master who merited ridicule, by his deficiencies and his vanity and his absurd self-righteous monologues. Mr. Truepenny invited exposure by posturing as something he was not. He was not a military man; he should never have been a master at a military college. And they knew this. All the officers at Marlow knew they were wrong to have engaged him, or they would never have reacted with such wrath to a handful of harmless caricatures and a clever enterprise to circulate them. The guardhouse and the floggings and Henry’s expulsion were an effort to deny their error. Henry sits clamped by his pain, keen-eyed, unwavering in his role as a guardian of military standards. But there is still the matter of his leaving the captains’ hall after having given his word, still there, pricking when his thoughts brush against it, like a hangnail. He was already expelled, he simply left before Marlow had fully vented its spleen. An act of self-respect, surely? Lying on a bench on the Thames path, he’d seen it clearly, that he must not fall in his own esteem, whatever others said.

  But he will not, now, be a military man, either; he will not have a profession, in the military or anywhere else. They take a sharp bend in the road and he’s pressed into the corner, and grief washes over him. At the loss of the topography class. And the mensuration class, with its chains and compasses and levels. And fortifications. And his abandoned copybook of perspective landscape drawings. He will not now have that expertise, the dignity of any expertise. All he’ll have is his manners, his name on a card, and the rumours about him of the failing plantation. A gentleman has his name and his word, and he has given up his word. Wyndham and Chorley will be eager to tell. They’ll latch on to it to separate themselves from him. Although what he did in leaving the captains’ hall has its inner meaning, too. Keeping one’s word was a fetish at Marlow. They were always blustering on about it in the middle of something sordid, like the time Harding hung from a tree by his knees and pissed his pants because he’d given his word to do it. His mother will understand his reasoning on this matter: she sees things as no one else in the world sees them.