Curiosity Page 5

  He’s drifting off when the coach gives a tremendous jolt and his pain jabs him awake. Then he finds he’s too cold to sleep. He puts his jacket back on and, turning his back on his sleeping uncle, slides to the floor and kneels with his head buried in his arms on the seat, a position that takes him instantly back to prayers by his netted bed in the sudden night of Jamaica, night that fell like an eyelid closing. He thinks of lying in his cot afterwards, listening to the Negroes calling on the road on their way back from the cane fields. In the juddering coach, he sinks into childhood dreams, he floats bodilessly above white sand in water honeycombed with sunlight. Sand-coloured crabs skitter sideways all at once to their holes, like corks on a net being dragged along the shore. A mango sucked to its flat, hairy pit lies salted with sand. Belle carries him up the path, her hands cool and dry. Oh, my stout man, she says. She stands in the hot, dark cookhouse in her white apron, she stirs the soup and raises the spoon to her lips. Her face bends over him, the fine net of moles around her eyes. She holds the iron spoon to his mouth, soup the colour of cut grass.

  The loud clopping of the horses’ hooves rouses him; the surface of the road must have changed. He turns his head to the side and opens his eyes. Against the curtain of the coach, floating like a moon, he seems to see a little planet earth. The globe with all its tendons exposed, the way he drew it as a boy. Trade routes like veins binding the earth together, ships beaded along the veins ploughing full-sailed to Africa, carrying gunpowder, alcohol, iron. Crossing the Middle Passage with Negroes crying in the hold. Sailing out of the harbour at Kingston, weighted with rum and sugar, bound for Bristol. He drew this as a boy, the world with a web around it, busy ships racing along its veins. He drew it as a boy sitting on the veranda at Halse Hall in Jamaica. Where are all those drawings? Lost. Everything they had was lost on the journey home.

  He feels a boot in his ribs, nudging him. His uncle is awake and looking down at him with disgust. “Get up,” he says. “You comport yourself like a heathen.”

  “It’s the posture of a Christian, I would have thought,” Henry says, but he lifts himself to his seat. And then, to save his pride, he opens the curtain and looks out. They will still be in Buckinghamshire. Mist shrouds the trunks of great trees in a meadow. He thinks of the messages concerning himself recently carried over this road. To his mother, who is somewhere. It’s almost a year since he saw her. When her husband died, her new husband, he was summoned to Dawlish to attend the funeral. He closes the curtain. “You haven’t said where my mother is.”

  “Between houses at the moment,” says Uncle Alger, taking up his vial of peppercorns. Between houses. A good answer, and probably true. Between Jamaica and Great Marlow, Henry lived in Hammersmith, Keynsham, Ottery St. Mary, and Dawlish. Between Keynsham and Ottery St. Mary, there was a prolonged stay at a country house in Berkshire, which they left suddenly one day just before dinner, spinning thrillingly away in a brougham with their host in hot pursuit, bareback and crouched like a jockey. Henry watched with glee, his face pressed against the glass as the man gained on them and his intent, pleading face suddenly loomed in the window. Close the curtain, Mother was shrieking. Take no heed.

  “Where is your sash?” his uncle asks testily.

  “I traded it for passage on a ferry,” says Henry. “On the Thames.”

  His uncle scowls and shakes his head.

  Just then a horn sounds and there’s an exuberant shout from the coachman. Henry opens the curtain again to watch the Bristol post race past, a blur of black and red, London-bound. There was talk of it at the inn this morning – it is said to do the journey in sixteen hours. Alger bends forward and watches in disapproval. “They cover six miles in an hour,” he says. “The human brain can’t withstand that sort of speed. A coachman toppled off last week and died, just short of London.”

  “Were you much affected by the heat in Jamaica, Uncle Alger?” Henry asks, just to torment him.

  “Never was in Jamaica,” his uncle snaps. “Didn’t fancy the voyage.”

  They stop at the coaching inn at Slough to rest the horses. They’re making excellent time themselves, thanks to the lack of luggage. Alger buys him a glass of ale with his dinner and Henry pulls in his horns a little. It’s mid-afternoon before they set off again. Henry opens the curtain and Alger does not protest. He watches the countryside crawl by, admiring giant oaks and the decorative curve of hedgerows, and to the north, the Chiltern Hills, lying in a blue ridge like the view of the Mocho Mountains from the Halse Hall veranda.

  At first back in England, his mother liked to recount the early days to him in detail, her own misery as a homesick girl with a tiny baby. She hasn’t wanted to talk about it in recent years. But now the abolitionists are all emboldened by the success of the Wilberforce Bill, and she’s publicly asked the sort of question that would never have occurred to anyone before. After the funeral last year, one of her callers had the appalling manners to bring it up. A Quaker, she must have been, the sort who insists her cakes be made with honey to avoid plantation sugar. “How could you stomach the horror of it, the whip?” she asked. Henry listened with admiration while his mother deftly recalled the caller to the situation of the moment. “The whip is not a pleasant instrument, but the Negroes won’t work without it. Certainly they feel pain when flogged, and they let you know it, but when you think of it, physical pain is the pain of a moment. It’s mental anguish, isn’t it, that lingers and leaves the deeper mark?”

  It’s because of the flogging that Jamaica is crowding in on him now. Or because of the show he saw with Clement in Piccadilly. The woman on display was not more than twenty, but her breasts lay heavily to her stomach, their tips turned outwards. Her only novelty was in this sort of proportion; on the question of buttocks, he observed, the lewd caricatures of the red-haired chambermaid he’d drawn at Marlow showed restraint. Yet her keepers led her by a leash and by their manner implied that she was dangerous – it was all the most preposterous charlatanism. On her part too, apparently – she was in it for a share of the gate, Bullock said. What would her percentage be? They were charging two shillings. So it was not the low and ignorant who came out in numbers to gawk at this woman; it was people with means. Had they never seen a Negro woman before? By their ignorance, they made her a spectacle. At one point in the show, she squatted on the platform. She happened to be right in front of Henry, her head just inches away – he was close enough to see the swollen pores around her nipples. When she squatted, a cry of delight went up from the crowd. Clement was plucking at his sleeve, and the woman rose up, looking right at Henry. At the nearness of her curly black cap he felt a childhood ache, felt the dry, familiar springs of African hair under his fingers. Her eyes were puffy and yellowed, tired, full of rage and knowing, and they met his with instant recognition. He could not have been more startled if she had called him by name. He felt his lips part to say something, and then he turned and shook Clement off and pushed his way out through the crowd.

  Finally he falls sound asleep, and in the yellow light of his pain, he dreams of leaving Marlow. But not alone – he is running away with Wyndham. They follow the dung-strewn towpath, sensing the rickety fortress of Great Marlow looming behind them, and then the towpath ends and they’re on a peninsula that juts out into the Thames, which is become a glowing lake. They pace uneasily on the bank, listening to the dogs pursuing them. Wyndham is taller than in life, luminously handsome, all his secret qualities made evident; the something soft in his nature is like an exposed heart. He has the coins they need for the ferry, he’s carrying them in a small leather purse, but he’s confused and weeping, and Henry has to wrestle the purse from him and pluck the coins out so they can board the ferry. This they manage to do just as the dogs and soldiers burst furiously out of the woods and onto the bank.

  FIVE

  n a morning when Percival took some pips of mush and lifted his head and smiled, Mary had a letter from Mr. Buckland. It did not come directly to her, but was tucked into a letter
addressed to Richard. The paper contained a drawing, a snakestone sliced open. There were no verteberries inside such as a snake would have, only a row of empty rooms. The legend was two words, and then there was text. Eventually Joseph lost patience with reading that text over and over to Mary, and began to shout the words to her one by one. Progressively! Larger! Chambers! There was an indignity here: Mary, who was of a stature to receive letters from scientific gentlemen, was unlettered, whereas Joseph, who had no interest in scholarship at all, had been sent to the grammar school at six. Mary pointed this out while Molly sat on the bench plaiting Lizzie’s hair. “I agree,” her mother said, and sat with her lips pressed together to indicate that nothing could be done about it, money being so much scarcer since the war began.

  The day the new collecting cupboard was delivered to Morley Cottage, Mary followed the hired donkey cart up Silver Street. It was a very steep hill; the donkey laboured hard and Richard kept an anxious hand on the cabinet. The wealthy showed a curious lack of judgment living away from the sea, so that they were always having to climb the hill or devise a means to be carried up it, while the poor had the ease of the shore. Even Morley Cottage climbed the hill, the parlour windows being higher than the dining room windows, although (Mary knew, from having been inside) the floors themselves had been built straight, not in accordance with the slant of the hill.

  Miss Elizabeth Philpot came to the door in an orange gown. The cabinet was to go in the drawing room, she said, and led them down a hall to the room where pressed flowers hung in frames on the walls and curiosities from the shore and cliffs lay on every surface. Devils’ toenails were splayed out in sets of five on the mantelshelf (Miss Elizabeth’s little joke) and thunderbolts arranged in patterns on a tray.

  “How grateful we will be for a bit of order in this room,” said the middle Miss Philpot while Mary’s father unwrapped the shallow drawers and slid them into the cabinet. “We can hardly reach for a book without knocking something to the floor,” said the eldest. The middle sister Mary had seen before, but not the eldest. In spite of her scars, she was the most handsome, with fine eyes and fine arching eyebrows. They had lived all three in London when they were girls, and were rich enough to pay for the pesthouse, but their father was a pious man and thought it a sin to try to thwart the will of the Almighty. “And so the Almighty had His way with the three of us,” said Miss Elizabeth Philpot, the day she told the story of her own pox to Mary.

  There were fine curtains in the drawing room and a carpet on the floor, and Mary stood calmly in the midst of it. “Ye have twelve drawers but only five different curiosities,” she said to her Miss Philpot (counting on her fingers: thunderstones, thunderbolts, verteberries, Devil’s toenails, snakestones). They were partners in collecting. Miss Philpot did not go to the shore herself; she bought from the Annings or sent her groom down to the lime quarry to inquire of the quarrymen whether they had turned up anything of interest in their labours. She always asked Mary eagerly what Mr. Buckland had to say. The Ammon Knight, she called him, because of the story Mary told her about the snakestone he put over his head.

  Miss Philpot stood in her puckered gown with the sleeves that swelled like pumpkins on her shoulders, frowning over the cabinet. “Twelve drawers,” she said. “Yes. How is everything to be arranged?”

  “There be ammonites with ridges and ammonites without,” said Mary slowly, for she was thinking. “There be the golden ammonite curled up in stones. And the pyrite ammonite that we find clean on the shore. And the grey ammonite, made of stone like the stone it lies in, and brown ones, the ones we find past Charmouth.” And then it seemed a lamp had begun to glow in her mind. “But in each of these materials, there be ammonites with ridges or ammonites without.”

  “Yes!” cried Miss Philpot. “We could sort them by substance or sort them by form. But let us begin by identifying each one as to form. In such a fashion, we will learn.” She sprang over to the bookshelf and pulled a large book down and laid it on the table. After she had leafed through it for a moment, she called Mary over and showed her, and Mary saw with a lurch that Miss Philpot was inviting her to read.

  On the open page were two illustrations of ammonites. Mary bent her face over the book and stared at the print that filled the bottom half of the page. The two other Miss Philpots, sitting on either end of a divan, turned their faces towards her, and her father looked sharply up from the corner where he was giving a last polish to the cupboard, and she put her finger to the lines, the way Joseph did when he read. The ammonite shell (she said in a forceful voice, as from the pulpit) contains a series of progressively larger chambers. Only the final and largest chamber was occupied by the animal at any given time. As the animal grew, it generated newer and larger chambers, abandoning its previous home.

  When she got to the limit of the words she knew from Mr. Buckland’s letter, she halted in confusion. Her father had turned away, he stood with his head down, but the Philpot sisters watched her still, their eyes anxious. Elizabeth Philpot let out a laugh of surprise and looked down at the page and then up at Mary, her mouth caught in a nervous twist, and then she picked up the book and began to read aloud from it herself.

  The next week, Miss Philpot stopped by the shop and told Molly that the grammar school was offering free places to apt scholars among the poor – four free places. One day shortly after, Richard was in Charmouth, so Molly and Mary put on their Sunday bonnets and Molly asked Mrs. Bennett to mind the little ones while they went to the school. A senior scholar came to the door of the school and went to call the master. But the master would not allow them into the hall to speak to him; he refused Mary outright as a Dissenter. Her mother heard this with bitterness (months had passed now without any of them darkening the door of the Independent Chapel) and she did not refrain from telling Richard when he came home. If he was angry that they had asked for charity, he did not say so. He said only that the Independent Chapel itself was setting up a Sunday school and if they found a teacher, Mary would go there. “On Sundays, I go to the shore,” said Mary, and he said, “Ye’ll go to the shore no more if there’s the chance of school.”

  Mary ached with shame that Miss Philpot would think she had set out to trick her. The lie was in the way she put her finger to the print – children who went to school did so, they ran their fingers along the lines in exactly that fashion. But it was not entirely a lie: the meaning of letters was in her brain, just as numbers had always been. If only she were given books and the time to bear down on them, she would certainly produce the sense on her own, and much more nimbly than other children! She thought of their neighbour Annie Bennett’s pitiful attempts to read, and the botched writing she’d seen produced by scholars from the grammar school, Joseph among them.

  But Mary Anning was not like other children. The whole town knew the story of the lightning bolt, with Mary herself at the centre of it, a little lass of under two years. Everyone told the story to explain Mary’s cleverness. They enjoyed dwelling on what a dull child she’d been before, a girl who hardly spoke and whose hair was the colour of mud. They told how a woman named Eliza Hastings had stopped by the workshop with talk of an amusement being held at Rack Field – a lottery, the prizes being a copper tea kettle and a leg of mutton, and horsemen making a display of their riding. Eliza Hastings offered to take Mary, and when Richard and Molly agreed, little dull Mary came happily out and took Eliza’s hand. And then, out on the field, a storm blew up. When the rain began, Eliza Hastings snatched Mary up from the ground and sought shelter under a giant oak, where two girls already huddled. And there the lightning bolt found them and the massive oak was split. Mrs. Stock was one who liked to tell it. “Dead in a trice!” she would cry. “Eliza Hastings, Fanny Fowler, Martha Drower! And you knocked insensible, stinking of brimstone.” Mrs. Stock would turn her eyes up into her head so that only the whites showed, to demonstrate the look of Mary.

  Mary listened to this story skeptically. If only she could have been a watcher in the field
that day, to see what had really happened to her other, duller self. Thunder must have echoed from the cliffs, although no one ever mentioned thunder. She could see the lightning swing from the sky like a great hairy rope, electric fluid pouring down it. The crowd in the meadow must have taken a breath and thanked Providence that they could still do so. And then someone would have cried out, “Look!” and all eyes would have gone to the oak tree, where the child Mary Anning lay as dead in a dead woman’s arms. When Mary turned her mind to the scene that followed, the story grew in fullness, words coming out on its branches the way blossoms come out on an apple tree. Mary would never be able to tell it properly – her tongue was enslaved to Dorsetshire speech. But no matter: the moment its branches were filled in, the story assumed a voice, bypassing Mary’s tongue and flowing out of Mary’s mind: