mentioning Baron Cuvier specifically. And when his remarks are at last made public, the men upstairs will understand the deeper meaning of your declaration of confidence. That way we will all be satisfied. Would that be acceptable?'
Mr Buckland pondered this suggestion. 'It could not be recorded in the Society's minutes,' he said at last, 'but I am certainly willing to say something off the record if that will please you, Miss Philpot.'
'It will, thank you.'
He and Reverend Conybeare looked up at Johnny. 'That will do, lad,' Reverend Conybeare muttered. 'Come down, now.'
'Is that all, Aunt Elizabeth? Shall I come down?' Johnny seemed disappointed that he could not carry out his threat.
'There is one more thing,' I said. Reverend Conybeare groaned. 'I should like to hear what you have to say at the meeting about the plesiosaurus.'
'I'm afraid women are not allowed in to the Society meetings.' Mr Buckland sounded almost sorry.
'Perhaps I could sit out in the corridor to listen? No one but you need know I am there.'
Mr Buckland thought for a moment. 'There is a staircase at the back of the room leading down to one of the kitchens. The servants use it to bring dishes and food and such up and down. You might sit out on the landing. From there you should be able to hear us without being seen.'
'That would be very kind, thank you.'
Mr Buckland gestured to the doorman, who had been listening impassively.
'Would you show this lady and young man up to the landing at the back, please. Come, Conybeare, we have kept them waiting long enough. They'll think we've gone to Lyme and back!'
The two men hurried up the stairs, leaving Johnny and me with the doorman. I will not forget the venomous look Reverend Conybeare threw me over his shoulder as he reached the top and turned to go into the meeting room.
Johnny chuckled. 'You have not made a friend there, Aunt Elizabeth!'
'It doesn't matter to me, but I fear I have put him off his stride. Well, we shall hear in a moment.'
I did not put off Reverend Conybeare. As a vicar he was used to speaking in public, and he was able to draw on that well of experience to recover his equanimity. By the time William Buckland had got through the procedural parts of the meeting--approving the minutes of the previous meeting, proposing new members, enumerating the various journals and specimens donated to the Society since the last meeting--Reverend Conybeare would have looked over his notes and reassured himself about the particulars of his claims, and when he began speaking his voice was steady and grounded in authority.
I could only judge his delivery by his voice. Johnny and I were tucked away on chairs on the landing, which led off of the back of the room. Although we kept the door ajar so that we could hear, we could not see beyond the gentlemen standing in front of the door in the crowded room. I felt trapped behind a wall of men that separated me from the main event.
Luckily Reverend Conybeare's public speaking voice penetrated even to us. 'I am highly gratified,' he began, 'in being able to lay before the Society an account of an almost perfect skeleton of
While the men were warmed by two coal fires and the collective bodily heat of sixty souls, Johnny and I sat frozen on the landing. I pulled my woollen cloak close about me, but I knew sitting back there was doing my weakened chest no good. Still, I could not leave at such an important moment.
Reverend Conybeare immediately addressed the plesiosaurus' most surprising feature--its extremely long neck. 'The neck is fully equal in length to the body and tail united,' he explained. 'Surpassing in the number of its vertebrae that of the longest necked birds, even the swan, it deviates from the laws which were heretofore regarded as universal in quadrupedal animals. I mention this circumstance thus early, as forming the most prominent and interesting feature of the recent discovery, and that which in effect renders this animal one of the most curious and important additions which geology has yet made to comparative anatomy.'
He then went on to describe the beast in detail. By this point I was stifling coughs, and Johnny went down to the kitchen to fetch me some wine. He must have liked what he saw down there better than what he could hear on the landing, for after handing me a glass of claret he disappeared down the back staircase again, probably to sit by the fire and practise flirting with the serving girls brought in for the evening.
