'Ah, I'm going to have the kitchen at the Three Cups roast it for my dinner! I am eating my way through the animal kingdom, you see, and have had such things as hedgehogs and field mice and snakes, yet in all this time I haven't had a common gull.'
'You've
eaten
mice!'
'Oh, yes. They are rather good on toast.'
I wrinkled my nose at the thought, and at the smell of the bird. 'But--the gull stinks, sir!'
Mr Buckland sniffed. 'Does it?' For such a keen observer of the world, he often overlooked the obvious. 'Never mind, I'll have them boil it up, and use the skeleton for my lectures. Now, what have you found today?'
Mr Buckland got very excited by the things I showed him--some golden ammos, a fish's scaly tail I would give to Miss Elizabeth, and a verteberry the size of a guinea. He asked so many questions, mixing in his own thoughts as he did, that I begun to feel like a pebble rolled back and forth in the tide. Then he insisted we turn round and go back to the landslip to look for more. The mare and I followed him until he stopped suddenly, just a stone's throw from the slip, and said, 'No, no, I won't have time--I'm to meet Doctor Carpenter at the Three Cups shortly. Let's come back this afternoon.'
'Can't, sir--the tide'll be in.'
Mr Buckland looked puzzled, as if a high tide were nothing to consider.
'We can't reach the landslip along this side of the beach when the tide's high,' I explained. 'Because of the cliffs bulging out there. The beach gets cut off.'
'What about coming from the Charmouth end?'
I shrugged. 'We could--but we'd have to go all the way round along the road to get to Charmouth first. Or take the cliff path--but that's not stable now, as you can see, sir.' I nodded towards the landslip.
'We can ride my mare to Charmouth--that's what she's here for. She'll take us quick as you like.'
I hesitated. Though I had accompanied gentlemen upon beach, I had never ridden on a horse with one. The townsfolk would certainly have things to say about that. Though Mr Buckland's high spirits seemed innocent to me, they might not to others. Besides, I didn't like being upon beach at high tide, hemmed in between cliff and sea. If there were another slip there was nowhere to escape to.
It was hard arguing with Mr Buckland, for his enthusiasm ran roughshod over everything. However, I soon discovered he changed his mind so often that by the time he reached Lyme he'd had about a dozen other ideas of how to spend the afternoon, and we didn't return to the landslip at all that day.
Mr Buckland didn't get to see where I'd dug up the second croc, as the tide had covered the ledge by the time we passed it. I did show him the cliff where the first one had come from, though, and he made a little sketch. He kept stopping to look at things--silly, some of them, like ammo impressions in the rock ledges that he had surely seen many times before--so I had to remind him of Doctor Carpenter waiting for him at the Three Cups, as well as the much more interesting specimen sitting in the workshop. 'Did you know, sir,' I added, 'that Doctor Carpenter saved my life when I were a baby?'
'Did he, now? That is what doctors often do--dose babies when they have fevers.'
'Oh, it was more than that, sir. I'd been struck by lightning, see, and Doctor Carpenter told my parents to put me in a bath of lukewarm water--'
Mr Buckland halted on the rock he was about to jump from. 'You were struck by lightning?' he cried, his eyes wide and delighted.
I stopped as well, embarrassed now that I had brought it up. I did not normally talk about the lightning to anyone, but had wanted to show off to this clever Oxford gentleman. This was the only thing I could think of that would impress him. It was silly, really, for it turned out later I were more than a match for him when it come to finding and identifying fossils, and his feeble grasp of anatomy sometimes made me laugh. I didn't know that at the time, though, and so I spent an uncomfortable time being questioned by him about what had happened to me in that field when I were a baby.
It did have its effect, though, for Mr Buckland clearly respected me for my experience. 'That is truly remarkable, Mary,' he said at last. 'God spared you, and gave you an experience almost unique in the world. Your body housed the lightning and clearly benefited from it.' He looked me up and down, and I blushed with the attention.
At last we got back, and I left Mr Buckland in the workshop, hopping round the crocodile and calling out questions to me even as I went up to the kitchen. Mam was at the range, boiling another family's linens. Doing laundry
