paying the Day brothers to do it, and she handled Lord Henley, her and Mam.
Why, then, was she being so contrary with me, just when my hunting had got exciting? I knew the monsters were there, whatever Elizabeth Philpot said. 'We didn't know what we was looking for till now,' I repeated. 'How big it was, what it looked like.
Now we know, Joe and I can find 'em easy, can't we, Joe?'
Joe didn't answer straightaway. He fiddled with a bit of string, twirling it between his fingers.
'Joe?'
'I don't want to look for crocodiles,' he said in a low voice. 'I want to be an upholsterer. Mr Reader has offered to take me on.'
I was so surprised I couldn't say a word.
'Upholstering?' Miss Philpot was quick to get in. 'That is a useful trade, but why choose it over others?'
'I can do it indoors rather than out.'
I found my voice. 'But, Joe, don't you want to find crocs with me? Weren't it a thrill to dig it out?'
'It was cold.'
'Don't be stupid! Cold don't matter!'
'It do to me.'
'How can you care about cold when these creatures are out there just waiting for us to find 'em? It's like treasure scattered all over the beach. We could get rich off them crocs! And you say it's too cold?'
Joe turned to Mam. 'I do want to work for Mr Reader, Mam. What do you think?'
Mam and Miss Elizabeth had kept quiet while Joe and I argued. I expect they didn't need to butt in, as Joe had clearly made up his mind the way they wanted. I didn't wait to hear what they said, but jumped up and ran downstairs to the workshop. I'd rather work on the croc than listen to them, with their plan to take Joe off the beach. I had work to do.
With head and body together again, the monster was almost eighteen feet long.
Getting it out of the cliff had been an ordeal that took three days, the Days and me working flat out whenever the tide let us. The whole thing was too big to lay on the table, so we'd spread the croc out along the floor. In the dim light it was a jumble of stony bones. I'd already spent a month cleaning it, but I still had some way to go to release it from the rock. My eyes were inflamed with squinting at it so much and rubbing dust into them.
At the time I was too young to understand Joe's choice, but later on I come to see that he had decided he wanted an ordinary life. He didn't want to be talked about the way I was, sneered at for wearing odd clothes and spending so much time alone upon beach with just rocks for company. He wanted what others in Lyme had--security and the chance to be respectable--and he jumped at an apprenticeship. There was nothing I could do about it. If I were offered the chance like Joe--if a girl could be apprenticed to a trade-
-would I have chosen the same and become a tailor or a butcher or a baker?
No. Curies were in my bones. For all the misery that come to my life from being upon those beaches, I wouldn't have abandoned curies for a needle or a knife or an oven.
'Mary.' Miss Philpot was standing over me. I didn't answer; I was still angry at her for siding with Joe. Picking up a blade, I begun to scrape at a verteberry. It were one of a long line, stacked one against the other like a row of tiny saucers.
'Joseph has made a sensible choice,' she said. 'It will be better for you and your mother. That doesn't mean you can't continue to look for creatures. You don't need Joseph to help you find them, do you, now that you know what you're looking for? You can do that yourself, and then hire the Days to extract them, just as we did with this one. I can help you with that until you are old enough to manage the men yourself. I offered to help your mother with the business side as well, but she says she will do it herself. And she was rather good with Lord Henley.' Miss Philpot kneeled by the croc and ran a hand over its ribs, which were all flattened out and crisscrossed like a willow basket. 'How beautiful this is,' she murmured, her tone softer and less sensible than before. 'I am still amazed at its size, and its strangeness.'
I agreed with her. The croc made me feel funny. While working on it I'd begun going to Chapel more regularly, for there were times sitting alone in the workshop with it that I got that hollowed-out feeling of the world holding things I didn't understand, and I needed comfort.
I may have lost Joe, but that didn't mean I was alone upon beach. One day as I went along the shore to Black Ven I
