'You been there?' Mary was frowning at each label.
'Of course. We grew up near it. Do you not keep track of where you find things?'
Mary shrugged. 'I don't read nor write.'
'Will you go to school?'
She shrugged again. 'Sunday school, maybe. They teach reading and writing there.'
'At St Michael's?'
'No, we ain't Church of England. We're Congregationalists. Chapel's on Coombe Street.' Mary picked up an ammonite I was especially proud of, for it was whole, not chipped or cracked, and had fine even ridges on its spiral. 'You can get a shilling for this ammo, if you give it a good clean,' she said.
'Oh, I'm not going to sell it. It's for my collection.'
Mary gave me a funny look. It occurred to me then that the Annings never collected to keep. A good specimen to them meant a good price.
Mary set down the ammonite and picked up a brown stone about the length of her finger, but thicker, with faint spiral markings on it. 'That's an odd thing,' I said. 'I'm not sure what it is. It could be just a stone, but it seems-- different. I felt I had to pick it up.'
'It's a bezoar stone.'
'Bezoar?' I frowned. 'What's that?'
'A hair ball like you find in the stomachs of goats. Pa told me about them.' She put it down, then took up a bivalve shell called a gryphaea, which the locals likened to the Devil's toenails. 'You haven't cleaned this gryphie yet, have you, miss?'
'I scrubbed the mud off.'
'But did you scrape it with a blade?'
I frowned. 'What kind of blade?'
'Oh, a penknife will do, though a razor's better. You scrape at the inside, to get the silt and such out, and give it a good shape. I could show you.'
I sniffed. The idea of a child teaching me how to do something seemed ridiculous.
And yet...'All right, Mary Anning. Come along tomorrow with your blades and show me.
I'll pay you a penny per fossil to clean them.'
Mary brightened at the suggestion of payment. 'Thank you, Miss Philpot.'
'Off you go, now. Ask Bessy on the way out to give you a slice of her fruitcake.'
When she was gone Louise said, 'She remembers the lightning. I could see it in her eyes.'
'How could she? She was little more than a baby!'
'Lightning must be hard to forget.'
The following day Richard Anning agreed to make me a specimen cabinet for fifteen shillings. It was the first of many cabinets I have owned, though he was only to make four for me before he died. I have had cabinets of better quality and finish, where the drawers glide without sticking and the joints don't need to be re-glued after a dry spell. But I accepted the flaws of his workmanship, for I knew that the care he neglected to put into his cabinets he put into his daughter's knowledge of fossils.
Soon Mary had found her way into our lives, cleaning fossils for me, selling me fossil fish she and her father had found once she discovered I liked them. She sometimes accompanied me to the beach when I went out hunting for fossils, and though I didn't tell her, I was more at ease when she was with me, for I worried about the tide cutting me off.
Mary had no fear of that, for she had a natural feel for the tides that I never really learned.
