John looked at me as if I were a small child trying to convince my nurse I could have another helping of pudding. 'You have been very foolish, Elizabeth. You have come all this way, making yourself ill
'It is just a cold, nothing more.'
'--ill
'I can at least try. It is truly foolish to come all this way and then not even try.'
'What exactly do you want from these men?'
'I want to remind them of Mary's careful methods of finding and preserving fossils, and to convince them to agree to defend her publicly against Cuvier's attack on her character.'
'They will never do that,' John said, running his finger along the spiral of his nautilus paperweight. 'Though they may defend the plesiosaurus, they will not discuss Mary. She is only the hunter.'
'Only the hunter!' I stopped myself. John was a London solicitor, with a certain way of thinking. I was a stubborn Lyme spinster, with my own mind. We were not going to agree, nor either of us convince the other. And he was not my target anyway; I must save my words for more important men.
John would not agree to accompany me to the meeting, and so I did not ask, but turned to an alternative--my nephew. Johnny was now a tall, lanky youth who led with his feet, had a residual fondness for his aunt and an active fondness for mischief. He had never told his parents about discovering me sneaking out of the house to go to the auction at Bullock's, and this shared secret bound us. It was this closeness I now relied on to help me.
I was lucky, for John and my sister-in-law were dining out on the Friday evening of the Geological Society meeting. I had not told him when the meeting was to take place, but allowed him to believe it was the following week. The afternoon of the supper I took to bed, saying my cold was worse. My sister-in-law pursed her lips in clear disapproval of my folly. She did not like unexpected visitors, or the sort of problems that, for all my quiet life at Lyme, I seemed to trail behind me. She hated fossils, and disorder, and unanswered questions. Whenever I brought up topics like the possible age of the earth, she twisted her hands in her lap and changed the subject as soon as it was polite to.
When she and my brother had gone out for the evening, I crept from my room and went to find Johnny and explain what I needed from him. He rose to the occasion admirably, coming up with an excuse for his departure to satisfy the servants, fetching a cab and hurrying me into it without anyone in the house discovering. It was absurd that I had to go to such lengths to take any sort of action out of the ordinary.
However, it was also a relief to have company. Now we sat in the cab on Bedford Street across from the Geological Society house, Johnny having gone in to check and found that the members were still dining in rooms on the first floor. Through the front windows we could see lights there and the occasional head bobbing about. The formal meeting would begin in half an hour or so.
'What shall we do, Aunt Elizabeth?' he demanded. 'Storm the citadel?'
'No, we wait. They will all stand so that the meal can be cleared away. At that moment I will go in and seek out Mr Buckland. He is about to become President of the Society, and I am sure he will listen to me.'
Johnny sat back and propped his feet up on the seat across from him. If I had been his mother I would have told him to put his feet down, but the pleasure of being an aunt is that you can enjoy your nephew's company without having to concern yourself with his behaviour. 'Aunt Elizabeth, you haven't said why this plesiosaur is so important,' he began. 'That is, I understand that you want to defend Miss Anning. But why is everyone so excited about the creature itself?'
I straightened my gloves and rearranged my cloak around me. 'Do you remember when you were a small boy and we took you to the Egyptian Hall to see all the animals?'
'Yes, I recall the elephant and the hippo.'
'Do you remember the stone crocodile you found, and I was so upset by? The one that is now in the British Museum and they call an ichthyosaurus?'
'I've seen it at the British Museum, of course, and you've told me about it,'
Johnny answered. 'But I confess I remember the elephant better. Why?'
'Well, when Mary discovered that ichthyosaurus, she did not know it at the time, but she was contributing to a new way of thinking about the world. Here was a creature that had never been seen before, that did not seem to exist any longer, but was extinct--the species had died out. Such a phenomenon made people think that perhaps the world is changing, however slowly, rather than being a constant, as had been previously thought.
