'Well, Colonel Birch.'
'Did you receive my letter about providing a dapedium for my collection?'
'Your letter?' I was thrown off guard, for I had not been thinking about that letter. 'Yes, I did receive it.'
'And you did not answer?'
I frowned. Colonel Birch was already steering the conversation away from where I had intended it to go, making it a criticism of my own behaviour rather than his. His tactics were low, and angered me, so that my response was direct as a dagger. 'No, I didn't answer it. I do not respect you, and I will never let you have any of my fossil fish. I did not feel the need to put such sentiments in writing.'
'I see.' Colonel Birch reddened as if he had been slapped. I expect no one had ever told him to his face that they did not respect him. Indeed, it was a new experience for us both: unpleasant for him, frightening and thrilling for me. Over the years, living in Lyme had made me bolder in my thoughts and words, but I had never before been quite so reckless and rude. I lowered my eyes and unbuttoned and rebuttoned my gloves, to give my trembling hands something to do. They were new, from a haberdasher's in Soho.
By the end of the year they too would be ruined by Lyme clay and sea water.
Colonel Birch laid his hand on the glass case nearest him, as if to steady himself.
It contained a variety of bivalves, which in other circumstances he might have studied.
Now he looked at them as if he had never seen one before.
'Since you left,' I began, 'Mary has not found one specimen of value, and the family has little stock on hand to sell, for she gave everything she found last summer to you.'
Colonel Birch looked up. 'That is unjust, Miss Philpot. I found my specimens.'
'You did not, sir. You did not.' I held up my hand to stop him as he tried to interrupt. 'You may think you found all of those jaw fragments and ribs and shark teeth and sea lilies, but it was Mary who directed you to them. She located them and then led you to find them. You are no hunter. You are a gatherer, a collector. There is a difference.'
'I--'
'I have seen you on the beach, sir, and that is what you do. You did not find the ichthyosaurus. Mary did, and dropped her hammer by it so that you would pick it up and see the specimen. I was there. I saw you. It is her ichthyosaurus, and you have taken it from her. I am ashamed of you.'
Colonel Birch stopped trying to interrupt me, but remained still, his head bowed, his lips in a pout.
'Perhaps you did not realise she was doing this,' I continued more gently. 'Mary is a generous soul. She is always giving away when she cannot afford to. Did you pay her for any of the specimens?'
For the first time Colonel Birch looked contrite. 'She insisted they were already mine, not hers.'
'Did you pay for her time, as her mother requested in a letter a few months back?
I know of the letter because I added your address for her. I am surprised, sir, that you chide me for not answering your letter when you have not answered one that is about far more important matters than collecting a fossil fish.'
Colonel Birch was silent.
'Do you know, Colonel Birch, this winter I discovered the Annings about to sell their table and chairs to pay the rent? Their table and chairs! They would have had to sit on the floor to eat.'
'I--I had no idea they were suffering so much.'
'I only convinced them not to sell their furniture by advancing them the money against future fossil fish Mary finds for me. I would have preferred just to give them the money--in general I find specimens myself rather than pay for them. But the Annings will not take charity from me.'
'I do not have the money to pay them.'
His words were so stark that I could not think of a reply. We were both silent then. Two women wandered arm in arm into the room, caught sight of us, glanced at each other, and hurried out again. It must have looked to them as if we were having a lovers'
