Remarkable Creatures

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.

'God 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.

8

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 shells 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.