When the Philpots and their things had been transferred to a cart to go on to Lyme, Miss Margaret called out, "Won't you come with us, Mary?"

"Can't." I gestured towards the beach. "I've curies to pick up."

"Come and see us tomorrow, then!" With a wave they left me alone at Charmouth. It was then the disappointment that Colonel Birch had not been on the coach struck me, and I went back upon beach feeling low and not at all like a girl whose family was coming into four hundred pounds. "He'll be on the next one," I said aloud to comfort myself. "He'll come and I'll have him to myself."

Normally when the Philpots suggested I visit them, I went straightaway. I always liked Morley Cottage, for it was warm and clean and full of food and the good smells from Bessy's baking-even if she liked to scowl at me. There were views of Golden Cap and the coast to lift the heart, and Miss Elizabeth's fish to look at. Miss Margaret played the piano to entertain us and Miss Louise gave me flowers to bring home. Best of all, Miss Elizabeth and I talked about fossils, and looked over books and articles together.

Now, though, I didn't want to see Miss Elizabeth. She had kept an eye on me for most of my life, and had become my friend even when others wouldn't, but when she stepped off the coach in Charmouth I sensed disapproval from her rather than any happiness at seeing me again. Maybe she was not thinking of me, though. Maybe she was ashamed of herself. And she should be-her judgement of Colonel Birch had been completely wrong, and she must feel bad about it, though she wouldn't say so. I could afford to be generous and ignore her foul mood, for I loved a man who would pull me from my poverty and make me happy, while she had no one. But I would not seek her out to sour my happiness.

I found reasons why I couldn't go up Silver Street. I needed to hunt curies to make up for the months when I hadn't. Or I insisted on cleaning the house to prepare for Colonel Birch coming to see us. Or I went out to Pinhay Bay to find him a pentacrinite since he had sold all of his. Then I went to meet each coach from London, though three came and went without him stepping off.

I was on my way back from the third coach, cutting through St Michael's from the cliff path, when I met Miss Elizabeth coming the other way. Both of us jumped a little, startled, like we wished we'd seen the other first and had held back so we wouldn't have to stop and greet each other.

Miss Elizabeth asked if I had been upon beach, and I had to admit I'd gone to Charmouth without hunting. She knew it were the day the coach arrived-I could see it in her face, working out why I had been there, and trying to hide her displeasure. She changed the subject, and we talked a little of Lyme and its doings while she had been gone. It was awkward, though, not the way we usually were with each other, and after a time we fell silent. I felt stiff, as if I'd sat too long on a leg and it had gone to sleep. It made me stand funny. Miss Elizabeth too held her head at an angle, like her neck still had a crick in it from all that riding in the London coach.

I was about to make an excuse and set off for c.o.c.kmoile Square when Miss Elizabeth seemed to reach a decision. When she is going to say something important she sticks out her chin and tightens her jaw. "I want to tell you about what happened in London, Mary. You are not to tell anyone I told you. Not your mother or brother, nor particularly my sisters, for they do not know what I witnessed." Then she told me all about the auction, describing in detail what was sold and who was there and what they bought, how even the Frenchman Cuvier wanted a specimen for Paris. She said how Colonel Birch made his announcement about me at the end, naming me as the hunter. All the time she was talking I felt I were listening to a lecture about someone else, a Mary Anning who lived in another town, in another country, on the other side of the world, who collected something other than fossils-b.u.t.terflies or old coins.

Miss Elizabeth frowned. "Are you listening, Mary?"

"I am, ma'am, but I'm not sure I'm hearing right."

Miss Elizabeth gazed at me, her grey eyes pinched and serious. "Colonel Birch has named you in public, Mary. He has told some of the most interested fossil collectors in the country to seek you out. They will be coming here to ask you to take them out as you have done Colonel Birch. You must prepare yourself, and take care that you don't...com-promise your character further." She said the last with such a pursed mouth it were a marvel any words come out at all.

I fingered some lichen on the gravestone I stood next to. "I am not worried for my character, ma'am, nor what others think of me. I love Colonel Birch, and am waiting for him to come back."

"Oh, Mary." A whole set of emotions crossed Miss Elizabeth's face-it was like watching playing cards being dealt one after the other-but mostly there was anger and sadness. Those two combined make jealousy, and it come over me then that Elizabeth Philpot was jealous of the attention Colonel Birch paid me. She shouldn't be. She never had to sell or burn her furniture to keep a roof over her head and stay warm. She had plenty of tables rather than just the one. She didn't go out every day no matter the weather or her health and stay out for hours hunting curies till her head swam. She didn't have chilblains on her hands and feet, and fingertips cut and torn and grey with embedded clay. She didn't have neighbours talking about her behind her back. She should pity me, and yet she envied me.

I shut my eyes for a moment, steadying myself with the gravestone. "Why can't you be glad for me?" I said. "Why can't you say, 'I hope you will be very happy'?"

"I-" Miss Elizabeth gulped as if words were choking her. "I do hope that," she finally managed to say, though it come out all strangled. "But I don't want you to make a fool of yourself. I want you to think sensibly about what is possible for your life."

I ripped the lichen off the stone. "You're jealous of me."

"I'm not!"

"Yes, you are. You're jealous of Colonel Birch because he courted me. You loved him and he paid no attention to you."

Miss Elizabeth looked stricken, like I'd hit her. "Stop, please."

But it was as if a river had risen in me and broken its banks. "He never even looked at you. It was me he wanted! And why shouldn't he? I'm young, and I've got the eye! All your education and your one hundred and fifty pounds a year and your elderflower champagne and your silly tonics, and your silly sisters with their turbans and roses. And your fish! Who cares about fish when there are monsters in the cliffs to be found? But you won't find them because you haven't got the eye. You're a dried up old spinster who will never get a man or a monster. And I will." It felt so good and so horrible to say these things aloud that I thought I might be sick.

Miss Elizabeth stood very still. It were like she was waiting for a gust of wind to blow itself out. When it had and I was finished, she took a deep breath, though what come out were almost a whisper, with no force behind it. "I saved your life once. I dug you out of the clay. And this is how you repay me, with the unkindest thoughts."

The wind come back like a gale. I cried out in such rage Miss Elizabeth stepped back. "Yes, you saved my life! And I'll feel the burden of being grateful to you for always. I'll never be equal to you, no matter what I do. Whatever monsters I find, however much money I earn, it will never equal your place. So why can't you leave Colonel Birch to me? Please." I was crying now.

Miss Elizabeth watched me with her level grey eyes until I had used up my tears. "I release you of the burden of your grat.i.tude, Mary," she said. "I can at least do that. I dug you out that day as I would have done for anyone, and as anyone else pa.s.sing would have done for you too." She paused, and I could see her deciding what to say next. "But I must tell you something," she continued, "not to hurt you, but to warn you. If you are expecting anything from Colonel Birch you will be disappointed. I had occasion to meet him before the auction. We ran into each other at the British Museum." She paused. "He was accompanying a lady. A widow. They seemed to have an understanding. I'm telling you this so that you will not have your expectations raised. You are a working girl, and you cannot expect more than you have. Mary, don't go."

But I had already turned and begun to run, as fast and far from her words as I could.

I was not there to meet the next London coach when it come to Charmouth. It was a soft afternoon, with plenty of visitors out, and I was behind the table outside our house, selling curies to pa.s.sersby.

I am not a superst.i.tious person, but I knew he would come, for though he did not know it, it was my birthday. I had never had a birthday present, and was due one. Mam would say his auction money was the present, but to me he was the gift.

When the clock on the Shambles bell-tower struck five I begun to follow Colonel Birch's progress in my mind even as I was selling. I saw him alight from the coach and hire a horse from the stables, then ride along the road till he could cut across one of Lord Henley's fields above Black Ven to Charmouth Lane. He would follow that to Church Street, then down past St Michael's and into b.u.t.ter Market. There all he had to do was to go right round the corner and he'd come into c.o.c.kmoile Square.

When I looked up, he appeared just as I knew he would, riding up on his borrowed chestnut horse and looking down at me. "Mary," he said.

"Colonel Birch," I replied, and curtseyed very low, as if I were a lady.

Colonel Birch dismounted, reached for my hand and kissed it in front of all the visitors rummaging through the curies and the villagers walking past. I didn't care. When he looked up at me, still bent over my hand, I spied behind his gladness uncertainty, and I knew then that Elizabeth Philpot had not been lying about the widow lady. As much as I had wanted to disbelieve her, she was not the sort to lie. As gently as I could I pulled my hand from Colonel Birch's grasp. Then the shadow of uncertainty become a true flame of sorrow, and we stood looking at each other without speaking.

Over Colonel Birch's shoulder there was a movement that distracted me from his sad eyes, and I saw a couple come arm in arm along Bridge Street, he stocky and strong, she bobbing up and down at his side like a boat in rough water. It was f.a.n.n.y Miller, who had lately married Billy Day, one of the quarrymen who helped me dig out monsters. Even the quarrymen were taken, then. f.a.n.n.y stared at us. When she met my eye she clutched her husband's arm and hurried away along the street as fast as her game leg would let her.

Then I knew what I would do with Colonel Birch, widow lady or no. It would be my present to myself, for I was not likely to have another chance. I nodded at him. "Go and see Mam, sir. She's been expecting you. I'll find you after."

I did not want to watch him hand over the money. Though I was grateful for it, I did not want to see it. I only wanted to see him. When he had tied up the horse and gone inside, I packed away the curies, then went quick up b.u.t.ter Market and followed Colonel Birch's path in reverse. I knew he would lodge as he always did at the Queen's Arms in Charmouth, and so would pa.s.s this way again. When I got to Lord Henley's field off Charmouth Lane I crossed to a stile and sat on it to wait.

Colonel Birch held his back so straight as he rode he looked like a tin soldier. With the sun low behind him and casting a long shadow before, I could not see his face until he pulled up alongside me. As I climbed to the top rung of the stile and balanced there, he took my hand so that I would not fall.

"Mary, I cannot marry you," he said.

"I know, sir. It don't matter."

"You are sure?"

"I am. It is my birthday today. I am twenty-one years old and this is what I want."

I was not a horse rider, but that day I had no fear as I reached over and swung into the s.p.a.ce between his arms.

He took me inland. Colonel Birch knew the surrounding countryside better than I did, for I never normally went into the fields, but spent all of my time on the sh.o.r.e. We rode through dusk's shadows lit here and there with panes of sunlight, up to the main road to Exeter. Once across we headed down darkening fields. Along the way we did not murmur sweet words to each other like courting couples, for we were not courting. Nor did I relax in his arms, for the horse swayed and the saddle pushed hard against me and I had to concentrate so I wouldn't fall off. But I was where I wanted to be and did not mind.

An orchard at the bottom of the field waited for us. When I lay down with Colonel Birch it was on a sheet of apple blossom petals covering the ground like snow. There I found out that lightning can come from deep inside the body. I have no regret discovering that.

I learned something else that evening, which come to me afterwards. I was lying in his arms looking up at the sky, where I counted four stars, when he asked, "What will you do with the money I have given your family, Mary?"

"Pay off our debts and buy a new table."

Colonel Birch chuckled. "That is very practical of you. Will you not do something for yourself?"

"I suppose I could buy a new bonnet." Mine had just been crushed under our coupling.

"What about something more ambitious?"

I was silent.

"For example," Colonel Birch continued, "you could move to a house with a bigger shop. Up Broad Street, for example, to where there's a good shop front, with a big window and more light in which to display your fossils. That way you would get more trade."

"So you're expecting me to keep on finding and selling curies, are you, sir? That I'll never marry, but run a shop."

"I did not say that."

"It's all right, sir. I know I won't marry. No one wants someone like me for a wife."

"That is not what I meant, Mary. You misunderstand me."

"Do I, sir?" I rolled off his shoulder and lay flat on the ground. Even since we had been talking it seemed the sky had got darker, and more and more stars had joined the first scattering.

Colonel Birch sat up stiffly, for he was old, and lying on the ground must hurt him. He looked down at me. It was too dark to see his expression. "I was thinking about your future as a fossil hunter, not as a wife. There are many women-most women, in fact-who can be perfectly good wives. But there is only one of you. Do you know, when I set up the auction in London I met many people who professed to know a great deal about fossils: what they are, how they came to be here, what they mean. But none of them knows even half of what you understand."

"Mr Buckland does. And Henry De La Beche. And what about Cuvier? They say that Frenchman knows more than any of us."

"That may be. But the others don't have the instinct for it that you do, Mary. Your knowledge may be self-taught and come from experience rather than from books, but it is no less valuable for that. You have spent a great deal of time with specimens; you have studied their anatomies and seen their variations and subtleties. You recognise the uniqueness of the ichthyosaurus, for example, that it is not like anything we have ever imagined."

But I didn't want to talk about me, or about curies. There were so many stars now that I couldn't count them. I felt very small, pinned to the ground under the knowledge of them all. They were beginning to hollow me out. "How far away do you think those stars are?"

Colonel Birch turned his face upward. "Very far. Farther than we can even imagine."

Perhaps it was because of what had just happened to me, of the lightning that come from inside, which made me open up to larger, stranger thoughts. Looking up at the stars so far away, I begun to feel there was a thread running between the earth and them. Another thread was strung out too, connecting the past to the future, with the ichie at one end, dying all that long time ago and waiting for me to find it. I didn't know what was at the other end of the thread. These two threads were so long I couldn't even begin to measure them, and where one met the other, there was me. My life led up to that moment, then led away again, like the tide making its highest mark on the beach and then retreating.

"Everything is so big and old and far away," I said, sitting up with the force of it. "G.o.d help me, for it does scare me."

Colonel Birch put his hand on my head and stroked my hair, which was all matted from my lying on the ground. "There is no need to fear," he said, "for you are here with me."

"Only now," I said. "Just for this moment, and then I will be alone again in the world. It is hard when there's no one to hold on to."

He had no answer to that, and I knew he never would. I lay back down and looked at the stars until I had to close my eyes.

An adventure in

an unadventurous life

It is rare for anything reported in the Western Flying Post to surprise me. Most are predictable stories: a description of a livestock auction in Bridport, or an account of a public meeting on the widening of a Weymouth road, or warnings of pickpockets at the Frome Fair. Even the stories of more unusual events where lives are changed-a man transported for stealing a silver watch, a fire burning down half a village-I still read with a sense of distance, for they have little effect on me. Of course if the man had stolen my watch, or half of Lyme burned down, I would be more interested. Still, I read the paper dutifully, for it makes me at least aware of the wider region, rather than trapped in an inward-looking town.

Bessy brought me the paper as I rested by the fire one mid-December afternoon. I did not often fall ill, and my weakness irritated me so that I had become as grumpy as Bessy normally was. I sighed as she set it on a small table next to me along with a cup of tea. Still, it was some diversion, for my sisters were busy in the kitchen, making up a batch of Margaret's salve to go in Christmas baskets, along with jars of rosehip jelly. I had wanted to include an ammonite in each basket, but Margaret felt they did not invoke a festive spirit and insisted on pretty sh.e.l.ls instead. I forget sometimes that people see fossils as the bones of the dead. Indeed, they are, though I tend to view them more as works of art reminding us of what the world was once like.

I paid little attention to what I read until I came across a short notice, wedged between news of two fires, one burning down a barn, the other the premises of a pastry cook. It read: On Wednesday evening Mary Anning, the well-known fossilist, whose labours have enriched the British and Bristol Museums, as well as the private collections of many geologists, found, east of town, and immediately under the celebrated Black Ven Cliff, some remains, which were removed on that night and the succeeding morning, to undergo an examination, the result of which is, that this specimen appears to differ widely from any which have before been discovered at Lyme, either of the Ichthyosaurus or Plesiosaurus, while it approaches nearly to the structure of the Turtle. The whole osteology has not yet been satisfactorily disclosed, owing to its very recent removal.

It will be for the great geologists to determine by what term this creature is to be known. The great Cuvier will be informed when the bones are completely disclosed, but probably it will be christened at Oxford or London, after an account has been accurately furnished. No doubt the Directors of the British or Bristol Museums will be anxious to possess this relic of the "great Herculaneum".

Mary had found it at last. She had found the new monster that she and William Buckland had speculated must exist, and I had to find out about her discovery in the newspaper, as if I were just anyone and had no claim on her. Even the men producing the Western Flying Post knew about it before me.

It is difficult to have a falling-out in a town the size of Lyme Regis. I had first learned that when we Philpots stopped seeing Lord Henley: we then managed to run into him everywhere, so that it became almost a game dodging him on Broad Street, along the path by the river, at St Michael's. We provided the town with years of gossip and amus.e.m.e.nt, for which we ought to have been thanked.

With Mary the severing was far more painful, because she was so close to my heart. After our fight in the churchyard, I regretted what I'd said to her almost immediately, wishing I had let her find out from Colonel Birch himself about the widow he might marry. I shall never forget the look of betrayal and despair on her face. On the other hand, I felt the sting of her comments about my jealousy and my sisters and my fish like a whipping that lingered.

I was too proud to go and apologise, though, and I expect she was too. I longed to have Bessy come into the parlour with a telltale grimace and announce that I had a visitor. But it didn't happen, and once the time for such a rapprochement had pa.s.sed, it became impossible to regain our old standing.

It is not easy to let someone go, even when they have said unforgivable things to you. For at least a year it cut me deeply to see her, out on the beach, or on Broad Street, or by the Cobb. I began to avoid c.o.c.kmoile Square, taking back-lanes to St Michael's, and the path by the church to the beach. I no longer went to Black Ven, where Mary usually hunted, instead heading in the opposite direction, past the Cobb and onto Monmouth Beach. There were not so many fossil fish there, and so I collected less, but at least I was not so likely to run into her.

It was lonely, though. Over the years Mary and I had spent a great deal of time together out hunting. Some days we wouldn't speak for hours, but her presence near by, bent over the ground, scrabbling in the mud or splitting open rocks, was a familiar comfort. Now I would glance around and still be surprised to find there was only me on the deserted beach. Such solitude brought on a self-indulgent melancholy that I detested, and I would make cutting remarks to jolt myself out of it. Margaret began to complain that I had grown more p.r.i.c.kly, and Bessy threatened to give notice when I was sharp with her.

It wasn't only on the beach that I missed Mary. I also longed for the company of her sitting at my dining table while I unpacked my basket and showed off what I had found. I could only do so the rare times when Henry De La Beche or William Buckland or Doctor Carpenter was about, or when someone occasionally came to see my collection and showed more than simply a fashionable interest in fossils. Without Mary's knowledge and encouragement, I felt my own studies slacken.

At the same time I had to watch her become more popular with outsiders. They actively sought her out, and she began taking visitors on fossil walks to Black Ven. With Colonel Birch's auction money and Mary's growing fame, the Annings were at last freeing themselves from the debt Richard Anning had put them into many years before. Mary and Molly Anning had new dresses, and they bought proper furniture again, and coal to warm themselves. Molly Anning stopped taking in laundry and began running the fossil shop properly, and it became a busy place. I should have been glad for them. Instead I was envious.

For a short time I even considered leaving Lyme and going to live with my sister Frances and her family, who had recently moved to Brighton. When I casually mentioned the possibility to Louise and Margaret, they both reacted with horror. "How can you think of leaving us?" Margaret cried, and Louise was pale and silent. I even found Bessy sniffling into her pastry dough, and had to rea.s.sure them all that Morley Cottage would always remain my home.

It took a long time, but eventually I did grow used to not having Mary's company or her friendship. It became as if she lived in Charmouth or Seatown or Eype. It was surprising that in such a small town she and I were able to avoid each other so well. But then, she was so busy with new collectors that I would have seen less of her even if I hadn't been trying to. While I accommodated her absence, a dull ache in my heart remained, like a fracture that, though healed, ever after flares up during damp weather.

I did run into her once where I couldn't get away. I was with my sisters, heading along the Walk, when Mary came from the opposite direction, a small black and white dog at her heels. It happened too quickly for me to duck aside. Mary started when she saw us, but continued towards us, as if determined not to be deterred. Margaret and Louise said h.e.l.lo to her, and she to them. She and I carefully avoided meeting each other's eyes.

"What a lovely little dog!" Margaret cried, kneeling to pet it. "What is his name?"

"Tray."

"Where did you get him?"

"A friend give him to me, to keep me company upon beach." Mary turned red, which told us who the friend was. "If he likes you, he lets you pet him. If he don't, he growls."

Tray sniffed at Louise's dress, then mine. I stiffened, expecting him to growl, but he looked up at me and panted. I had always a.s.sumed pets did not like those their owners did not like.

Other than that meeting, I was able to avoid her, though I sometimes saw her in the distance, Tray following, on the beach or in town.

There was one moment when I was briefly tempted to try to restore our friendship. A few months after our fight, I heard that Mary had discovered a loose jumble of bones, which she pieced together in a speculative fashion, though the specimen was without a skull. I wanted to see it, but the Annings sold it to Colonel Birch and shipped it to him before I got up the courage to visit c.o.c.kmoile Square. I was only able to read about it in papers Henry De La Beche and Reverend Conybeare published, in which they named this notional creature a plesiosaurus, a "near lizard". It had a very long neck and huge paddles, and William Buckland likened it to a serpent threaded through the sh.e.l.l of a turtle.

Now, according to the newspaper, she had found another specimen, and I was once again being tempted to visit c.o.c.kmoile Square. After reading the brief notice, questions popped into my head that I wanted to ask Mary. What did she find first? How big was the specimen, and in what sort of condition? How complete? Did this one have a skull? Why did she stay out all night to work on it? Whom did they expect to sell it to: the British or Bristol Museums, or to Colonel Birch once more?

My desire to see it was so strong that I went so far as to get up to fetch my cloak. At that moment, however, Bessy appeared with another cup of tea for me. "What are you doing, Miss Elizabeth? Surely you're not going out in the cold?"

"I-" As I looked into Bessy's broad face, her cheeks red and accusing, I knew I couldn't tell her where I wanted to go. Bessy had been pleased that Mary and I were no longer friends, and would now have plenty of opinions about my desire to visit c.o.c.kmoile Square which I didn't have the energy to fight. Nor could I explain to Margaret and Louise, who had both encouraged me to make amends with Mary and then, when I wouldn't, let the matter drop and never mentioned her.

"I was just going to the door to see if I could see the post coming," I said. "But do you know, I'm feeling a little dizzy. I think I'll go to bed."

"You do that, Miss Elizabeth. You don't want to go anywhere."

It is rare that I feel Bessy's caution is sound.