Remarkable Creatures

I had never heard of such a thing. I wanted to ask Lord Henley more about this idea, but he always stated things so baldly that there was no room for questions. He made me feel an idiot, even when I knew he was a bigger one than I.

It was just as well that we were interrupted by Molly Anning. Mercifully she did not bring the crying baby, but arrived trailing Mary and the smell of cabbage. "I'm Molly Anning, sir," she said, wiping her hands on her apron and looking around her, for she would never have been inside the Assembly Rooms. "I run our fossil shop. What was it you wanted?" She was the same height as Lord Henley, and her level gaze seemed to subdue him a little. She surprised me too. I had never heard of the workshop being called a shop, or of her having anything to do with it. But then, without a husband, she had to take on new tasks. Running a business appeared to be one of them.

"I want to take this specimen, Mrs Anning. If your daughter will allow it," Lord Henley added with a touch of sarcasm. "But then, your daughter answers to you, does she not?"

"Course." Molly Anning barely glanced at the skull. "How much you want to pay, then?"

"Three

pounds."

"That--" I began.

"I expect there be plenty of gentlemen prepared to pay more," Molly Anning talked over me. "But we'll take your money, if you like, as a deposit for the whole creature once Mary finds it."

"And if she doesn't?"

"Oh, she'll find it all right. My Mary always finds things. She's special like that--always has been, since she was struck by lightning. That were in your field, weren't it, Lord Henley, where she was struck?"

Several things astonished me: that Molly Anning was talking so confidently to a member of the gentry; that she had rather cleverly allowed him to name his price, throwing him off balance and getting an idea of the worth of an object whose value she didn't know; that she had the cunning to make the lightning strike seem to be his responsibility. Most surprising, though, she had actually complimented her daughter just when Mary needed it. I'd heard people say that Molly Anning was an original; now I understood what they meant.

Lord Henley hardly knew how to respond. I stepped in to help him out. "Of course, the Annings will give you the head for three pounds if the body isn't found within, shall we say, two years?"

Lord Henley glanced from Molly Anning to me. "All right," he replied at length, placing his hand again on his prize.

After encountering the skull, I found it difficult to sleep, dreaming of the eyes of animals I had looked into: horses, cats, seagulls, dogs. There was a flatness in them, the lack of a God-given spark, that frightened me into wakefulness.

On Sunday I remained behind after the service at St Michael's, waving on Bessy and my sisters. "I will catch you up," I said, and stood at the back of the church, waiting for the vicar to finish his goodbyes to the other parishioners. Reverend Jones was a plain man, with a boxy head and close-cropped hair, whose thin lips twisted and turned even when every other part of him was still. I had not spoken with him except to mouth pleasantries, for he was uninspiring during services, his voice reedy, his sermons lacklustre. However, he was a man of God, and I hoped he might be able to give me guidance.

At last only a girl remained behind, sweeping the floor. Reverend Jones was going up and down the pews, picking up hymn sheets and checking for gloves or prayer books left behind. He did not see me. Indeed, it felt as if he did not want to see me. His pastoral duties over for the day, he was doubtless thinking about the dinner he would soon sit down to and the sleep by the fire afterwards. When I cleared my throat and he looked up, he could not stop his mouth tightening into a brief grimace. "Miss Philpot, is this handkerchief yours?" He held out a ball of white cloth, probably hopeful that I could be easily dismissed.

"I'm afraid not, Reverend Jones."

"Ah. You are looking for something else, perhaps? A purse? A button? A hair pin?"

"No, I wished to discuss a matter with you."

"I see." Reverend Jones pushed out his lips. "My dinner will be ready soon and I need to finish up here. You don't mind...?" He continued along the pews, straightening cushions as I trailed behind. All the while I could hear the scratch of the girl's broom on the floor.

"I wanted to ask you what you thought of fossils." In trying to hold his attention, my voice came out louder than I had intended in the empty church. The sweeping stopped, but Reverend Jones continued up the aisle to the oak pulpit, where he picked up his own handkerchief and put it in his pocket.

"What do I think of fossils, Miss Philpot? I do not think of them."

"But do you know what they are?"

"They are skeletons that have been compressed by rock over time to become stone themselves. Most educated people know that."

"But the skeletons--are they of creatures that still exist today?"

Reverend Jones hurried to the altar and gathered up a set of candlesticks and the altar cloth. I felt like an idiot following him about.

"Of course they exist," he said. "All of the creatures God made exist." He opened a door in the aisle to the left of the altar, which led to a small back room where church bits and pieces were stored. Over his shoulder I spied a jug labelled "Holy Water" sitting on a table. I remained in the doorway while Reverend Jones shut the candlesticks and cloth in a cupboard. "I'm afraid I don't understand your question, Miss Philpot," he called over his shoulder.

I opened my purse and poured into my palm a few bits of fossils that had found their way there. Most of my pockets and purses held fossil pieces. Reverend Jones' mouth twisted in disgust as he glanced at the contents: ammonites, belemnite shafts, a chunk of fossilised wood, a length of crinoid stem. He reacted as if I had trailed horse dung into the church on my shoes. "Why on earth are you carrying those about?"

Ignoring his question, I held out an ammonite. "I should like to know where the live versions of these are, Reverend Jones, for I have never seen one." As we gazed at the fossil, I felt for a moment that I was being sucked into its spiral, farther and farther back in time until the past was lost in the centre.

Reverend Jones' response to the ammonite was more prosaic. "Perhaps you haven't seen them because they live out at sea, and their bodies only wash up after they die." He turned away and, pulling the door shut, locked it with the deft turn of a key, a gesture he seemed to enjoy.

I stepped in front of him so that he could not hurry off to his dinner. Indeed, he could not move at all, but was pinned in the corner. Not being able to get away from me and my awkward questions seemed to disturb Reverend Jones even more than my bringing out the ammonite had. He whipped his head from side to side. "Fanny, have you done yet?" he called. There was no response, however. She must have gone outside to dump the sweepings.

"Have you heard about the crocodile head the Annings have found in the cliffs and are showing at the Assembly Rooms?" I asked.

Reverend Jones forced himself to look straight at me. He had narrow eyes that seemed to be seeking out a horizon even when they were set on mine. "I know of it, yes."

"Have you seen it?"

"I have no desire to see it."

I was not surprised. Reverend Jones showed no curiosity about anything other than what would soon be on his plate. "The specimen does not look like any creature that lives now," I said.

"Miss

Philpot--"

"Someone--a member of this congregation, in fact--has suggested that it is an animal that God rejected in favour of a better design."

Reverend Jones looked aghast. "Who said that?"

"It is not important who said it. I just wondered if there was any truth in the theory."

Reverend Jones brushed down the sleeves of his coat and pursed his lips."Miss Philpot, I am surprised. I thought you and your sisters were well versed in the Bible."

"We

are--"

"Let me make it clear: you need only look to Scripture for answers to your questions. Come." He led the way back to the pulpit, where the Bible he had read from lay.

As he began flipping through the pages, the girl approached. "Reverend Jones, sir, I done the sweeping."

"Thank you, Fanny." Reverend Jones regarded her for a moment, then said,

"There is something else I would like you to do for me, child. Come over to the Bible. I want you to read something out to Miss Philpot. There's another penny in it for you." He turned to me. "Fanny Miller and her family joined St Michael's a few years ago from the Congregationalists, for they were deeply disturbed by the Annings' fossil hunting. The Church of England is clearer in its biblical interpretation than some of the Dissenters'

churches. You have found much comfort here, haven't you, Fanny?"

Fanny nodded. She had wide, crystal blue eyes topped with smooth, dark eyebrows that contrasted with her fair hair. She would never lead with her eyes, though they were her best feature, but with her brow, which was wrinkled with apprehension as she gazed at the Bible.

"Don't be frightened, Fanny," Reverend Jones said to soothe her. "You are a very good reader. I have heard you at Sunday school. Start here." He laid a finger on a passage.

She read in a halting whisper:"And God said, 'Let the waters bring forth abundantly the moving creature that hath life, and fowl that may fly above the earth in the open firmament of heaven.' And God created great whales, and every living creature that moveth, which the waters brought forth abundantly, after their kind, and every winged fowl after his kind; and God saw that it was good. And God blessed them, saying, 'Be fruitful, and multiply, and fill the waters in the seas, and let fowl multiply in the earth.'

And the evening and the morning were the fifth day.

"Excellent, Fanny, you may stop there."

I thought he had finished patronising me by having an ignorant girl read out from Genesis, but Reverend Jones himself continued, "And God said, 'Let the earth bring forth the living creature after his kind, cattle, and creeping thing, and beast of the earth after his kind,' and it was so."

I stopped listening after a few lines. I knew them anyway, and couldn't bear his oboe voice, which lacked the depth one expected of a man in his position. I actually preferred Fanny's unschooled recitation. While he read I let my eye rest on the page. To the left of the Biblical words were annotations in red of Bishop Ussher's chronological calculations of the Bible. According to him, God created Heaven and Earth on the night preceding the 23rd October 4004 BC. I had always wondered at his precision.

"...And the evening and the morning were the sixth day."

When Reverend Jones finished we were silent.

"You see, Miss Philpot, it really is very simple," Reverend Jones said. He seemed much more confident now that he had the Bible with him. "All that you see about you is as God set it out in the beginning. He did not create beasts and then get rid of them. That would suggest He had made a mistake, and of course God is all-knowing and incapable of error, is He not?"

"I suppose not," I conceded.

Reverend Jones' mouth writhed. "You suppose not?"

"Of course not," I said quickly. "I'm sorry; it's just that I am confused. You are saying that everything we see around us is exactly as God created it, are you not? The mountains and seas and rocks and hills--the landscape is as it was at the beginning?"

"Of course." Reverend Jones looked around at his church, tidy and quiet. "We are done here, aren't we, Fanny?"

"Yes, Reverend Jones."

But I was not done. "So every rock we see is as God created it at the beginning," I persisted. "And the rocks came first, as it says in Genesis, before the animals."

"Yes, yes." Reverend Jones was becoming impatient, his mouth chewing an imaginary straw.

"If that is the case, then how did the skeletons of animals get inside rocks and become fossils? If the rocks were already created by God before the animals, how is it that there are bodies in the rocks?"

Reverend Jones stared at me, his mouth at last stilled into a tight straight line.

Fanny Miller's forehead was a field of furrows. One of the pews creaked in the stillness.

"God placed the fossils there when He created the rocks, to test our faith," he responded at last. "As He is clearly testing yours, Miss Philpot."

It is my faith in you that is being tested, I thought.

"Now, I really am very late for my dinner," Reverend Jones continued. He picked up the Bible, a gesture that seemed to suggest he thought I might steal it. "Do not ask me difficult questions," he might as well have said.

I never again mentioned fossils to Reverend Jones.

Lord Henley had to wait almost the agreed two years for the crocodile body to emerge. At first when I saw him at church or the Assembly Rooms or on the street, he would shout each time, "Where's the body? Have you dug it out yet?" I would have to explain that the landslip was still blocking it and could not easily be shifted. He seemed not to understand until Mary and Joseph Anning and I took him one day to see the landslip for himself. He was startled, and also angry. "No one told me there was this much rock blocking it," he claimed, stomping at a bubble of clay. "You've misled me, Miss Philpot, you and the Annings."

"Indeed no, Lord Henley," I replied. "Remember, we said it may take up to two years to clear, and if the body isn't uncovered by then you will get the skull regardless."

He was still angry, and would not listen, but mounted the grey horse he rode everywhere and galloped back up the beach, spraying water.

It was Molly Anning who reined in Lord Henley. She did little but let him rant.

When he had run out of words and breath, she said, "You want your three pounds back, I'll give it you now. There be plenty of others lined up to buy that skull, and for a better price too. Here, take your money." She reached into her apron pocket as if she had anything other than air in it, the money being long spent. Of course Lord Henley backed down. I envied Molly her confidence with such a man, though I didn't tell her, for she would have responded with a scornful, "And I envy you your one hundred and fifty pounds per year."

Eventually Lord Henley's pursuit of the crocodile died down. It requires patience to look for fossils. Only Mary and William Lock and I remained attentive, checking the landslip after every storm and spring tide. Mary tried to get there first, but sometimes William Lock slipped in before her.

Mercifully, a fever kept the hostler abed and got Mary and me out early the day she found it. A huge storm had lasted two days, and was too fierce for anyone to venture out during it. On the third morning I woke at dawn to a strange quiet, and knew. I left my warm bed, dressed quickly, threw on my cloak and bonnet and hurried out.

The sun was just a sliver off Portland, and the beach was empty but for a familiar figure in the distance. As I got to the end of Church Cliffs I could see the landslip was gone, the storm having scrubbed clean the beach as if expecting a special guest. Mary had climbed up onto the ledge the hole made and was hammering at the cliff. When I called to her she turned. "It's here, Miss Philpot! I found it!" she cried, jumping from the ledge.

We smiled at each other. For this brief moment, before all the fuss began, we savoured the solitude of the dawn, and the purity of finding treasure together.

It took the Day brothers three days to extract the body, working around the tides.

As they got out each slab and laid it on the beach, it was like watching a mosaic being put together before us. As when the skull had been dug out, a crowd gathered to watch the Days and inspect the crocodile. A few were fascinated and keen to speculate on its origins. Others enjoyed the spectacle but threw dark looks at it. "It be a monster, is what it be," a man muttered. "Watch the croc'll come and eat you in your bed if you're bad!" a mother called after her children. "Lord, it be ugly," another said. "Let Lord Henley come and lock it away in the Manor!"

Lord Henley also came to see it, though he did not even dismount from his horse.

"Excellent," he declared, the horse jogging sideways as if to keep its distance from the stone slabs. "I will send my coach as soon as it's ready." He seemed to have forgotten that cleaning and mounting the specimen would take several weeks. And he still had to agree a price before the Annings would give it up.

I had expected to be involved in this negotiation, but discovered soon after the specimen had been brought back to the workshop that Molly Anning had already done the business, and Lord Henley paid them twenty-three pounds for it. Moreover, she shrewdly got him to waive any rights to other fossils they found on his property. She had even written it out in a note he signed, when I had assumed she couldn't write. I could not have done better myself.

It was only when the body had been cleaned and placed next to the skull that we could at last see the creature for what it was: an impressive, eighteen-foot stone monster unlike anything we had ever heard of. It was not a crocodile. It was not just the huge eyes, the long smooth snout and the even teeth. It also had paddles rather than legs, and its torso was an elongated barrel woven of ribs along a strong spine. It ended in a long tail, with a kink partway along the vertebrae. It made me think a bit of a dolphin, of a turtle, or a lizard, and yet none of these was quite right.

I couldn't help thinking of what Lord Henley had said about the creature being one of God's rejected models, and of Reverend Jones' response. I did not know what to make of it. Most who came to look at the specimen called it a crocodile, as did the Annings themselves. It was easier to think that was what it was, perhaps an unusual species that lived somewhere else in the world--Africa, perhaps. But I knew it was something different, and after I saw it complete, I stopped referring to it as a crocodile, instead calling it simply Mary's creature.

Joseph Anning built a wooden frame, and once Mary had cleaned and varnished the bones, they cemented into the frame the limestone slabs that held the creatures. Then she added a skim of lime plaster around the specimen to set off the bones and give the whole thing a smooth, finished appearance. She was pleased with her handiwork, but once it disappeared to Colway Manor she heard nothing from Lord Henley, who seemed to have lost interest in the specimen, like a hunter not bothering to eat the deer he has slain. Though of course, Lord Henley was no hunter, but a collector.

Collectors have a list of items to be obtained, a cabinet of curiosities to be filled by others' work. They might go out onto the beach sometimes and walk along, frowning at the cliffs as if looking at an exhibition of dull paintings. They cannot concentrate, for the rocks all look the same to them: quartz looks like flint, beef like bones. They find little more than a few bits of broken ammonite and belemnite and call themselves experts.

Then they buy from the hunters what they need to make up their list. They have little true understanding of what they collect, or even that much interest. They know it is fashionable, and that is enough for them.

Hunters spend hour after hour, day after day out in all weather, our faces sunburned, our hair tangled by the wind, our eyes in a permanent squint, our nails ragged and our fingertips torn, our hands chapped. Our boots are trimmed with mud and stained with sea water. Our clothes are filthy by the end of the day. Often we find nothing, but we are patient and hard-working and not put off by coming back empty-handed. We may have our special interest--an intact brittle star, a belemnite with its sac attached, a fossil fish with every scale in place--but we pick up other things too, and are open to what the cliffs and beach offer us. Some, like Mary, sell what they find. Others, like me, keep our finds. We label the specimens, recording where and when we found them, and display them in cases with glass tops. We study and compare specimens, and we draw conclusions. The men write up their theories and publish them in journals, which I read but may not contribute to myself.

Lord Henley stopped collecting other fossils once he had Mary's creature. Perhaps he considered it the pinnacle of his collecting achievement. Those more serious about fossils know their search is never over. There will always be more specimens to discover and study, for, as with people, each fossil is unique. There can never be too many.

Unfortunately, that would not be the last of my dealings with Lord Henley.

Though we occasionally nodded at each other on the street or across church pews, I had little real contact with him for some time. When I next did, it was vehement.

It began in London. We visited annually, each spring, once the roads were clear enough to travel. It was our treat for getting through another winter in Lyme. I didn't mind so much the storms and the isolation, for these were good conditions in which to find fossils. Louise, however, could not garden, and became frustrated and silent. Worse, though, was watching Margaret grow grey and melancholic. She was a summer person, needing warmth and light and variety to stimulate her. She hated the cold, and Morley Cottage was a prison she felt trapped in, with the Assembly Rooms quiet now the season was finished and no new visitors were arriving to be entertained. Winter months gave her too much time to think about the years passing and the loss of her prospects and, bit by bit, her looks. She no longer had the fresh roundness of youth, but was becoming lined and thin. By March Margaret had always faded like a threadbare nightgown worn for too long.

London was her tonic. It gave all of us a dose of old friends and new fashions, of parties and fine food, of new novels for Margaret and natural history journals for me, and of the joy of having a child in the house, our young nephew Johnny providing welcome distraction from the onset of middle age. We went at the end of March, and generally stayed a month to six weeks, depending upon how irritated we became with our sister-in-law, and she with us. While too timid to show it outright, our brother's wife grew more and more brittle as the weeks went on, and found excuses to remain in her bedroom, or in the nursery with Johnny. I believe she thought we had grown coarse from living in Lyme, while we found her too concerned with how things might look to others. Lyme had fostered an independent spirit in us that surprised more conservative Londoners.

We went out a good deal--to visit friends, to plays, to the Royal Academy, and of course to the British Museum, which was so close to our brother's house that it could be seen from the drawing room windows on the first floor. I was always keen to lean over the cases containing the museum's fossil collection, fogging the glass with my breath till the guards frowned. I even donated a fine complete specimen of a dapedium, a fossil fish I was particularly fond of. In thanks, Charles Konig, the Keeper of the Natural History Department, waived the museum's entrance fee for the month I was visiting. On the label the collector was called simply Philpot, neatly sidestepping the question of my sex.

One spring during our stay in London, we began to hear excellent reports of William Bullock's Museum in the newly built Egyptian Hall on Piccadilly. His expanding collection contained art, antiquities, artefacts from all over the world, and a natural history collection. My brother took all of us there one day. The exterior was in the Egyptian style, with huge windows and doors with slanted sides, like the entrance to a tomb, fluted columns topped with papyrus scrolls, and statues of Isis and Osiris looking out over Piccadilly from their perches on the cornice above the door. The building's facade was painted a startling yellow, with MUSEUM trumpeted from a large sign. I thought it overly dramatic in amongst the otherwise sober brick buildings; but then, that was the point.

Perhaps it was just that, having become used to the simple whitewashed houses of Lyme, I found such novelty jarring. The collection in the Egyptian Hall was even more startling. Displayed in the oval entrance hall were a variety of curious pieces from all over the world. There were African masks and feathered totems from Pacific islands; tiny warrior figures in clay and decorated with beads; stone weapons and fur-lined cloaks from northern climates; a long, thin boat called a kayak, that could hold just one person, with carved paddles decorated with designs burnt into the wood. An Egyptian mummy was displayed in an open sarcophagus painted with gold leaf.

The next room was much larger and housed a collection of unconvincing paintings "by the Old Masters", we were told, though they looked to me to be copies done by indifferent Royal Academy students. More interesting were the cases of stuffed and mounted birds, from the plain English blue tit to the exotic red-footed booby brought back by Captain Cook from the Maldives. Margaret, Louise and I were content to study them, as from living in Lyme we had all become more aware of birds than we had been in London.

Bored with birds, however, little Johnny had gone on with his mother to the Pantherion, the museum's biggest room. He was gone but a moment before he came running back. "Auntie Margaret, come, you must see the enormous elephant!" He grabbed his aunt's hand and pulled her into the next room. The rest of us followed, bemused.

Indeed, the elephant was enormous. I had never seen one before, nor a hippopotamus, an ostrich, a zebra, a hyena or a camel. All were stuffed and grouped under a domed skylight in the centre of the room, in a grassy enclosure dotted with palm trees, depicting their habitat. We stood and stared, for these were rare sights indeed.

Being young and not appreciating rarity, Johnny did not look for long, but raced around the room. He ran up as I was inspecting a boa constrictor that had been wound around a palm tree above my head. "It's your crocodilly, Auntie Elizabeth! Come and see it!" He tugged my arm and gestured at an exhibit at the far end of the room. My nephew knew about the Lyme beast which he, like others, persisted in calling a crocodile. For his birthday I had done two watercolours of it for him, one of the fossil itself, the other of how I imagined the creature to have looked when it was alive. I went with Johnny now, curious to see a real crocodile and compare it to what Mary had found.

Johnny was not wrong, however: it was indeed "my" crocodile. I gaped at the display. Mary's creature lay on a gravel beach next to a pool of water with reeds poking out along the edges. When Mary first uncovered it, it had been flattened, its bones jumbled, but she had felt that she should leave it as she found it, rather than try to reconstruct it. Apparently William Bullock felt no such constraint, having prised the whole body away from the slabs that held it, rearranged the bones so the paddles had clear forms, stacked the vertebrae in a straight line, and even added what were probably plaster of Paris ribs added where some had gone missing. Worse, they'd put a waistcoat around its chest, with the paddles sticking out of the arm holes, and perched an oversize monocle by one of its prominent eyes. Near its snout was spread a tempting array of animals a crocodile might feed on: rabbits, frogs, fish. At least they had not managed to prise open the mouth and stuff prey into its craw.

The

label

read:

STONE CROCODILE

Found by Henry Hoste Henley

In the wilds of Dorsetshire

I had always assumed the specimen was still in one of the many rooms at Colway Manor, mounted on a wall or set on a table. To see it in an exhibition in London, laid out in a dramatic tableau so alien to what I knew of it, and claimed by Lord Henley as his own discovery, was a shock that froze me.

It was Louise who spoke for me when the rest of the family joined Johnny and me. "That is an abomination," she said.

"Why did Lord Henley buy it if he was just going to pass it on to this--circus?" I looked around and shuddered.

"I expect he made a pretty profit," my brother said.

"How could he do that to Mary's specimen? Look, Louise, they've straightened out its tail she worked so hard to preserve as she found it." I gestured to the tail, which no longer had a kink three-quarters of the way along.

Perhaps the most upsetting thing about Mary's creature being presented in this vulgar way was how much it cheapened the experience of seeing it. In Lyme people were impressed by its strangeness, and gave it hushed respect. At Bullock's Museum it was just another display amongst many, and not even the most awe-inspiring. Though I hated seeing it laid out and dressed so ludicrously, I grew angry at visitors who gave it just a quick glance before hurrying back to the flashier elephant or hippo.

John had a word with one of the attendants and discovered that the specimen had been on display since the previous autumn, meaning Lord Henley had only owned it for a few months before selling it on.

I was so angry that I could not enjoy the rest of the museum. Johnny grew bored with my mood, as indeed did everyone but Louise, who took me off to Fortnum's for a cup of tea so that I could rant without disturbing the rest of the family. "How could he sell it?" I repeated, stirring my tea violently with a tiny spoon. "How could he take something so unusual, so remarkable, so linked to Lyme and to Mary, and sell it to a man who dresses it up like a doll and shows it off as if it is something to be laughed at! How dare he?"

Louise laid her hand over mine to stop me doing damage to one of Fortnum's cups. I dropped the spoon and leaned forward. "Do you know, Louise," I began, "I think--I think it's not a crocodile at all. It doesn't have the anatomy of a crocodile, but no one wants to say so publicly."

Louise's grey eyes remained clear and steady. "What is it, if not a crocodile?"

"A creature that no longer exists." I waited for a moment, to see if God would bring the ceiling crashing down on me. Nothing happened, however, except for the waiter arriving to refill our cups.

"How can that be?"

"Do you know of the concept of extinction?"

"You mentioned it when you were reading Cuvier, but Margaret made you stop, for it upset her."

I nodded. "Cuvier has suggested that animal species sometimes die out when they are no longer suited to survive in the world. The idea is troubling to people because it suggests that God does not have a hand in it, that He created animals and then sat back and let them die. Then there are those like Lord Henley, who say the creature is an early model for a crocodile, that God made it and rejected it. Some think God used the Flood to rid the world of animals He didn't want. But these theories imply God could make mistakes and need to correct Himself. Do you see? All of these ideas upset someone.

Many people, like our Reverend Jones at St Michael's, find it easiest to accept the Bible literally and say God created the world and all its creatures in six days, and it is still exactly as it was then, with all of the animals still existing somewhere. And they find Bishop Ussher's calculation of the world's age as six thousand years comforting rather than limiting and a little absurd." I picked up a langue de chat from the plate of biscuits between us and snapped it in two, thinking of my conversation with Reverend Jones.

"How does he explain Mary's creature, then?"

"He thinks they are swimming about off the coast of South America, and we haven't yet discovered them."

"Could that be true?"

I shook my head. "Sailors would have seen them. We have been sailing around the world for hundreds of years and never had a sighting of such a creature."

"And so you believe that what we were looking at in Bullock's Museum is a fossilised body of an animal that no longer exists. It died out, for reasons that may or may not be God's intention." Louise said this carefully, as if to make it crystal clear to herself and to me.

"Yes."

Louise chuckled and took a biscuit. "That would certainly surprise some members of the congregation at St Michael's. Reverend Jones might have to ask you to leave and join a Dissenting church!"

I finished the langue de chat. "I don't know that Dissenters are any different, really. They may differ doctrinally from the Church of England, but the Dissenters I know in Lyme interpret the Bible just as literally as Reverend Jones does. They would never accept the idea of extinction." I sighed. "Mary's creature needs studying, by anatomists, like Cuvier in Paris, or geologists from Oxford or Cambridge. They might be able to provide persuasive answers. But that will never happen while it is masquerading as an exotic Dorset croc at Bullock's!"

"It could be worse, tucked away in Colway Manor," Louise countered. "At least here more people will see it. And if the right people--your learned geologists--see it and recognise its worth, they may think it worth studying."

I had not thought of that. Louise was always more sensible than I. It was a relief to talk to her, and gave me a little comfort, but not enough to stem my fury at Lord Henley.

When we returned to Lyme the following month, I went to confront him, even before I saw Mary Anning. I did not announce my visit, nor tell my sisters where I was going, but strode across the fields between Morley Cottage and Colway Manor, ignoring the wildflowers and blooming hedgerows I'd missed while in London. Lord Henley was not at home, but I was directed to one of the boundaries of his property, where he was overseeing the digging of a drainage ditch. It had been a rainy spring while we were away, and my shoes and the hem of my dress were sodden and muddy by the time I reached him.

Lord Henley was sitting on his grey horse, watching his men work. It annoyed me that he did not get down and stand amongst them. By then, anything he did would have made me cross, for I'd had a whole month during which to fuel my anger. He did dismount for me, however, bowing and welcoming me back to Lyme. "How was your stay in London?" As he spoke, Lord Henley eyed my muddy skirt, probably thinking his wife would never be seen publicly in such dirty clothes.

"It was very good, thank you, Lord Henley. I was astonished, however, by something I saw at Bullock's Museum. I thought the specimen you bought from the Annings was still at Colway Manor, but I discovered you sold it on to Mr Bullock."

Lord Henley's face lit up. "Ah, the crocodile is on display, then? How does it look? I trust they spelled my name correctly."

"Your name was there, yes. I was rather surprised not to see Mary Anning named, however, nor even Lyme Regis."

Lord Henley looked blank. "Why would Mary Anning be named? She didn't own it."

"Mary found it, sir. Have you forgotten that?"

Lord Henley snorted. "Mary Anning is a worker. She found the crocodile on my land--Church Cliffs are part of my property, you know. Do you think these men--" he nodded at the men shifting mud "--do they own what is on this land simply because they dig it up? Of course not! It belongs to me. Besides which, Mary Anning is a female. She is a spare part. I have to represent her, as indeed I do many Lyme residents who cannot represent themselves."

For a moment the air seemed to crackle and buzz, and Lord Henley's piggish face bulged at me. It was my anger distorting everything. "Why did you make such a fuss to obtain the specimen if you were only going to sell it on?" I demanded when I had finally mastered my emotions.

Lord Henley's horse was becoming restless, and he stroked its neck to calm it. "It was cluttering up my library. It's much better where it is."

"Indeed it is, if that is the casual attitude you took towards it. I did not expect such fickle behaviour from you, Lord Henley. It demeans you. Good day, sir." I turned before I could see the effect of my feeble words on him, but as I stumbled away across the field I heard his bark of laughter. He did not call out to me, as other men might have. Doubtless he was glad to see the back of me, a bedraggled spinster scattering mud and bile.

As I walked I cursed under my breath, and then began to out loud, for there was no one about to hear me. "God damn you, you bloody idiot" I had never said such words aloud, nor even thought them, but I was so angry that I had to do something out of the ordinary. I was furious at Lord Henley for riding roughshod over scientific discovery; for turning a mystery of the world into something banal and foolish; for throwing my sex back at me as something to be ashamed of. A spare part, indeed.

But I was angrier at myself. I had lived nine years in Lyme Regis by then, and had come to value my independence and forthrightness. However, I had not learned to stand up to the Lord Henleys of the world. I could not tell him what I thought of his selling Mary's creature in a way that he understood. Instead he ridiculed me and made me feel it was I who had done something wrong. "Idiot. Bloody idiot!" I repeated.

"Oh!"

I looked up. I was crossing a small bridge over the river just as Fanny Miller was coming along the path that led down to the centre of town. She had clearly heard me, for her cheeks were bright red and her brow wrinkled, and her girlish eyes were wide, like shallow puddles with no depth.

I glared at her, and did not apologise. Fanny hurried away, glancing back now and then as if she feared I might follow her and swear some more. Though horrified, she was doubtless also keen to tell family and friends what the queer Miss Philpot had said.

Although I dreaded having to tell Mary about her creature, I have never been one to put off bad news--the wait only makes it worse. I went that afternoon to Cockmoile Square. Molly Anning directed me to Pinhay Bay, to the west of Monmouth Beach, where Mary had been commissioned by a visitor to extract a giant ammonite. "They want it for a garden feature," Molly Anning added with a chuckle. "Daft."

I flinched. In the Morley Cottage garden there was a giant ammonite with a one-foot diameter that Mary had helped me to dig out; I had given it to Louise for Christmas.

Molly Anning probably didn't know that, as she had never come up Silver Street to see us. "Why climb a hill if there's no need to?" she often said.

Molly Anning would be glad for the money from that ammonite, however. Since selling the monster to Lord Henley, Mary had been hunting without success for another complete specimen. She had only found tantalising pieces--jawbones, fused vertebrae, a fan of small paddle bones--which brought in a little money, but far less than if she had discovered them all together.

I found her near the Snakes' Graveyard--I now called it the Ammonite Graveyard-

-which had attracted me to Lyme years before. She had managed to cut out the ammonite from a ledge, and was wrapping it in a sack to drag back along the beach--hard work for a girl, even one used to it.

Mary greeted me with joy, for she often said she missed me when I was making my London visit. She told me about all that she had found while I was away, and what they had managed to sell, and who else had been out hunting. "And how was London, Miss Elizabeth?" she asked finally. "Did you buy any new gowns? I see you've a new bonnet."

"Yes, I have. How observant you are, Mary. Now, I have to tell you about something I saw in London." I took a deep breath and told her about going to Bullock's and discovering her creature, describing in frank terms the state of it, down to its waistcoat and monocle. "Lord Henley should not have sold it to someone who would treat it so irresponsibly, no matter how many people got to see it," I finished. "I hope you won't be approaching him with any future finds." I did not tell her I had just been to see Lord Henley and been laughed at.

Mary listened, her brown eyes widening only when I mentioned that the creature's tail had been straightened. Apart from that her reaction was not what I had expected. I thought she would be angry that Lord Henley had profited from her find, but for the moment she was more interested in the attention being given to it.

"Was lots of people looking at it?" she asked.

"A fair number." I didn't add that other exhibits were more popular.

"Lots and lots? More even than the number of people living in Lyme?"

"Far more. It has been on show for several months, so I expect thousands have seen it."

"All them people seeing my croc." Mary smiled, her eyes bright as she looked out to sea, as if spying a queue of spectators on the horizon, waiting to see what she would find next.

5

We will become fossils,

trapped upon beach forever

Finding that crocodile changed everything. Sometimes I try to imagine my life without those big, bold beasts hidden in the cliffs and ledges. If all I ever found were ammos and bellies and lilies and gryphies, my life would have turned out as piddling as those curies, with no lightning jolts to turn me inside out and give me joy and pain at the same time.

It weren't just the money from selling the croc that changed things. It was knowing there was something to hunt for, and that I was better at finding it than most--this was what were different. I could look ahead now and see--not random rocks thrown together, but a pattern forming of what my life could be.

When Lord Henley paid us twenty-three pounds for the whole crocodile, I wanted lots of things. I wanted to buy so many sacks of potatoes they'd reach the ceiling if you stacked them. I wanted to buy lengths of wool and have new dresses made for Mam and me. I wanted to eat a whole dough cake every day, and burn so much coal the coalman would have to come every week to refill the coal bin. That was what I wanted. I thought my family wanted those things too.

One day Miss Elizabeth come to see Mam after the deal had been done with Lord Henley, and sat with her and Joe at the kitchen table. She didn't talk of wool or coal or dough cakes, but of jobs. "I think it will benefit the family most if Joseph is apprenticed,"

she said. "Now you have the money to pay the apprentice fee, you should do so.

Whatever he chooses will be a steadier income than selling fossils."

"But Joe and me are looking for more crocs," I interrupted. "We can make money enough off them. There's plenty of rich folk like Lord Henley who'll want crocs of their own now he's got one. Think of all them London gentlemen, ready with good money for our finds!" By the end I was shouting, for I had to defend my great plan, which was for Joe and me to get rich finding crocs.

"Quiet, girl," Mam said. "Let Miss Philpot talk sense."

"Mary," Miss Elizabeth begun, "you don't know if there are more creatures--"

"Yes, I do, ma'am. Think of all them bits we found before--the verteberries and teeth and pieces of rib and jaw that we didn't know what they were. Now we know! We got the whole body now and can see where those parts come from, how the body's meant to be. I've made a drawing of it so we can match what goes where. I'm sure there's crocs everywhere in them cliffs and ledges!"

"Why didn't you find any other whole specimens until now, then, if there are as many as you say?"

I glared at Miss Elizabeth. She had always been good to me, giving me work cleaning curies, bringing us extra bits of food and candles and old clothes, encouraging me to go to Sunday school to learn to read and write, sharing her finds with me and showing interest in what I found too. We couldn't have got the croc out of the cliff without her paying the Day brothers to do it, and she handled Lord Henley, her and Mam.

Why, then, was she being so contrary with me, just when my hunting had got exciting? I knew the monsters were there, whatever Elizabeth Philpot said. "We didn't know what we was looking for till now," I repeated. "How big it was, what it looked like.

Now we know, Joe and I can find 'em easy, can't we, Joe?"

Joe didn't answer straightaway. He fiddled with a bit of string, twirling it between his fingers.

"Joe?"

"I don't want to look for crocodiles," he said in a low voice. "I want to be an upholsterer. Mr Reader has offered to take me on."

I was so surprised I couldn't say a word.

"Upholstering?" Miss Philpot was quick to get in. "That is a useful trade, but why choose it over others?"

"I can do it indoors rather than out."

I found my voice. "But, Joe, don't you want to find crocs with me? Weren't it a thrill to dig it out?"

"It was cold."

"Don't be stupid! Cold don't matter!"

"It do to me."

"How can you care about cold when these creatures are out there just waiting for us to find 'em? It's like treasure scattered all over the beach. We could get rich off them crocs! And you say it's too cold?"

Joe turned to Mam. "I do want to work for Mr Reader, Mam. What do you think?"

Mam and Miss Elizabeth had kept quiet while Joe and I argued. I expect they didn't need to butt in, as Joe had clearly made up his mind the way they wanted. I didn't wait to hear what they said, but jumped up and ran downstairs to the workshop. I'd rather work on the croc than listen to them, with their plan to take Joe off the beach. I had work to do.

With head and body together again, the monster was almost eighteen feet long.

Getting it out of the cliff had been an ordeal that took three days, the Days and me working flat out whenever the tide let us. The whole thing was too big to lay on the table, so we'd spread the croc out along the floor. In the dim light it was a jumble of stony bones. I'd already spent a month cleaning it, but I still had some way to go to release it from the rock. My eyes were inflamed with squinting at it so much and rubbing dust into them.

At the time I was too young to understand Joe's choice, but later on I come to see that he had decided he wanted an ordinary life. He didn't want to be talked about the way I was, sneered at for wearing odd clothes and spending so much time alone upon beach with just rocks for company. He wanted what others in Lyme had--security and the chance to be respectable--and he jumped at an apprenticeship. There was nothing I could do about it. If I were offered the chance like Joe--if a girl could be apprenticed to a trade-

-would I have chosen the same and become a tailor or a butcher or a baker?

No. Curies were in my bones. For all the misery that come to my life from being upon those beaches, I wouldn't have abandoned curies for a needle or a knife or an oven.

"Mary." Miss Philpot was standing over me. I didn't answer; I was still angry at her for siding with Joe. Picking up a blade, I begun to scrape at a verteberry. It were one of a long line, stacked one against the other like a row of tiny saucers.

"Joseph has made a sensible choice," she said. "It will be better for you and your mother. That doesn't mean you can't continue to look for creatures. You don't need Joseph to help you find them, do you, now that you know what you're looking for? You can do that yourself, and then hire the Days to extract them, just as we did with this one. I can help you with that until you are old enough to manage the men yourself. I offered to help your mother with the business side as well, but she says she will do it herself. And she was rather good with Lord Henley." Miss Philpot kneeled by the croc and ran a hand over its ribs, which were all flattened out and crisscrossed like a willow basket. "How beautiful this is," she murmured, her tone softer and less sensible than before. "I am still amazed at its size, and its strangeness."

I agreed with her. The croc made me feel funny. While working on it I'd begun going to Chapel more regularly, for there were times sitting alone in the workshop with it that I got that hollowed-out feeling of the world holding things I didn't understand, and I needed comfort.

I may have lost Joe, but that didn't mean I was alone upon beach. One day as I went along the shore to Black Ven I saw two strangers hunting by the cliffs. They barely looked up, they were so excited to be swinging their hammers and grubbing about in the mud. The next day there were five men, and two days after that, ten. None was known to me. From overhearing their talk I learned they were looking for their own crocodiles. It seemed my crocodile had brought them to Lyme beaches, attracted by the promise of treasure.

Over the next few years Lyme grew crowded with hunters. I had been used to a deserted beach and my own company, or that of Miss Elizabeth or Joe, and being with them had often felt like being by myself, they were so solitary in their hunting. Now there was the tinking of hammer against stone all along the shore between Lyme and Charmouth, as well as on Monmouth Beach, and men were measuring, peering through magnifying glasses, taking notes, and making sketches. It was comical. For all the fuss made, not one found a complete croc. A cry would go up from someone, and the others would hurry over to look, and it would be nothing, or just a tooth or a bit of jaw or a verteberry--if they were lucky.

I was passing a man searching amongst the stones one day when he picked up a bit of round, dark rock. "A vertebra, I think," he called to his companion.

I couldn't help it--I had to correct his mistake, even though he hadn't asked me.

"That'll be beef, sir," I said.

"Beef?" The man frowned. "What is 'beef'?"

"It's what we call shale that's been calcified. Bits of it often look like verteberries, but it's got vertical lines in the layers, a bit like rope fibres, that you don't see in verteberries. And verteberries are darker in colour. All the bits of the croc are. See?" I dug out a verteberry from my basket that I'd found earlier and showed him. "Look, sir, verteberries have six sides, like this, though they're not always clear till you clean them.

And they're concave, like someone's pinched them in the middle."

The man and his companion handled the verteberry as if it were a precious coin--which, in a way, it was. "Where did you find this?" one asked.

"Over there. I got others too." I showed them what I'd found and they were astonished. When they showed me theirs, most of it was beef we had to throw out. All day they come up with would-be curies for me to judge. Soon others caught on, and I was called here and there to tell the men what they had or hadn't found. Then they would ask me where they should look, and before long I was leading them on fossil hunts along the beach.

That was how I come to be in the company of the geologists and other interested gentlemen, looking over their mistakes and finding curies for them. A few were from Lyme or Charmouth: Henry De La Beche, for instance, who had just moved to Broad Street with his mother and was but a few years older than me. But most were from farther away, Bristol or Oxford or London.

I had never been in the company of educated gentlemen. Sometimes Miss Elizabeth come with us, and that made it easier for me, for she was older and of their class, and could go between as needed. When I was alone with them I was nervous at first, wondering how I was meant to act and what I could say. But they treated me as a servant, and that was a part I could play easily enough--though I was a servant who spoke her mind sometimes, and surprised them.

It was always a little awkward with the gentlemen, though, and become more so as I grew older and my chest and hips rounder. Then people begun to talk.

Maybe they would have talked less if I had been more sensible. But something took hold of me when I begun to grow up, and I become a bit silly, as girls do when they're leaving their childhoods behind. I started to think about the gentlemen, and looked at their legs and the way they moved. I begun to cry without knowing why, and shout at Mam when there was no reason to. I begun to prefer Miss Margaret to the other Philpots, as she was more sympathetic to my moods. She told me stories from the novels she read, and helped me try to make my hair prettier, and taught me to dance in the parlour at Morley Cottage--not that I would ever get to with a man. Sometimes I stood outside the Assembly Rooms and watched them through the bay window, dancing under the glass chandeliers, and imagined it was me floating round in a silk gown. I would get so upset I'd have to run along the Walk, which is the path the Day brothers built along the beach to link the two parts of the town. It took me to the Cobb, where I could walk up and down and let the wind blow away my tears, with no one to follow and tut at my silliness.

Mam and Miss Elizabeth despaired over me, but they couldn't fix me, for I didn't think I was broke. I was growing up, and it was hard. It took two brushes with death, with a lady and a gentleman, before Miss Elizabeth pulled me out of the mud and I truly joined the adult world.

Both happened along the same stretch of beach, just at the end of Church Cliffs, before the shore curves towards Black Ven. It was early spring, and I was walking along the beach at low tide, scanning for curies, thinking about one of the gentleman I had helped the day before who smiled at me with teeth as white as quartz. I was so blinded by rocks and my thoughts that I didn't see the lady till I almost stepped on her. I stopped short, feeling a jolt in my stomach like when you're carrying a kicking child away from something they want and their foot catches you.

She were lying where the tide had left her, face down, seaweed all tangled in her dark hair. Her fine dress was sodden and dragged down with sand and mud. Even in that state I could see it cost more than all of our Anning clothes together. I stood over her a long time, watching to see if she might take a breath and spare me from seeing death in her face. It come to me that I would have to touch her, turn her over to see if she was dead and if I knew her.

I didn't want to touch her. I spent most of the days of my life picking up dead things off the shore. If she had been stone like a croc or an ammo I would have turned her over quick as you like. But I weren't used to touching dead flesh that had been a real person. I knew I had to do it, though, so I took a deep breath, quickly grabbed a shoulder and rolled her over.

I knew she were a lady the moment I saw her beautiful face. Others laughed at me when I said so, but I could see it in her noble brow and fine, sweet features. I called her the Lady, and I was right.

I kneeled by her head, closed my eyes, and said a prayer to God to take her into His bosom and comfort her. Then I pulled her up towards the cliff so the sea wouldn't take her back while I went for help. I couldn't leave her all unkempt, though: it would be disrespectful. Now I weren't afraid to touch her, though her flesh was cold and hard like a fish. I untangled the seaweed from her hair and combed it out. I straightened her limbs and dress, and folded her hands over her breast as I'd seen others laid out. I even begun to enjoy the ritual of it--that's how odd I were at that time in my life.

Then I saw a fine chain round her neck and pulled at it. Out from under her dress come a locket, small and round and gold, with MJ engraved in fancy lettering. There was nothing inside--any pictures or locks of hair had been scrubbed away by the sea. I didn't dare take it with me for safe keeping. Anyone finding me with it could accuse me of being a thief. I tucked the locket away, and hoped no one found her and stole it off her while I was gone.

When I was satisfied the Lady looked presentable, I said another little prayer, blew her a kiss, and run back to Lyme to tell them I'd found a drowned lady.

They laid her out in St Michael's and put a notice in the Western Flying Post to see if someone could identify her. I went to see her every day. I couldn't stop myself. I brought flowers gathered from the wayside--daffs and narcissi and primroses--and set them round her, and tore up some of the petals to scatter over her dress. I liked to sit in the church, though it weren't where we normally worshipped. It was quiet, with the Lady lying there so peaceful and beautiful. Sometimes I had a little cry for her or for myself.

It was like an illness come over me those days with the Lady, though I had no fever or chills. I'd never felt so strongly about anything before, though I wasn't sure what it was I felt. I just knew that the Lady's story was tragic, and maybe my story, if I had one, would be tragic too. She had died, and if I hadn't found her, she might have become a fossil, her bones turned to stone, like all the other things I hunted upon beach.

One day I arrived and the lid on the Lady's coffin was nailed shut. I cried because I couldn't see her beautiful face. Everything made me cry. I lay down on a pew and cried myself to sleep. I don't know how long I was asleep for, but when I woke Elizabeth Philpot was sitting beside me. "Mary, get up and go home, and don't come here again,"

she said quietly. "This has gone on long enough."

"But--"

"For one thing, it's unwholesome." She was referring to the smell, which never bothered me, as I'd smelled worse upon beach, and in the workshop, when I brought back slabs of limestone and the piddocks in their holes died after a few days out of the water.

"That don't matter to me."

"It is sentimental behaviour that should remain in the gothic novels Margaret reads. It doesn't suit you. Besides that, she has been identified and her family is coming to fetch her. There was a shipwreck off Portland of a ship arriving from India. She was on board with her children. Imagine sailing all that long way, only to be lost at the very end."

"They know who she is? What's her name?"

"Lady

Jackson."

I clapped my hands, so pleased I were right about her being a Lady. "What's her Christian name? The M on the locket?"

Miss Elizabeth hesitated. I think she knew her answer would feed my obsession.

But she does not lie easily. "It's Mary.

I nodded, and begun to cry. Somehow I knew it.

Miss Elizabeth sighed hard, like she was trying to keep from shouting. "Don't be silly, Mary. Of course it is a sad story, but you don't know her, and sharing a name doesn't mean you are anything alike."

I covered my face with my hands and kept on crying, out of embarrassment now as much as anything else, for not being able to control myself in front of Miss Elizabeth.

She sat with me for a little bit, then gave up and left me to my tears. I didn't tell her, but I was crying because Lady Jackson and I were alike. We were both Marys and we would both die. However beautiful or plain a person was, God would take you in the end.

For a week after they took Lady Jackson away, I couldn't touch curies on the beach for thinking of what they had been--poor creatures that had died. For that little while I allowed myself to be as timid and superstitious as my old playmate Fanny Miller.

I avoided the gentlemen out hunting, and hid on Monmouth Beach, where it was quieter.

But no curies means no food on the table. Mam ordered me back upon beach and said she wouldn't let me inside if I returned with an empty basket. Soon enough I pushed death away, till the next time when he come to stand much closer.

Later that spring I at last found a second crocodile. Perhaps all the gentlemen I was attending was what made it take so long to find one. Elizabeth Philpot must have been pleased she were right that the cliffs and ledges don't give up their monsters so easily as I'd thought. When I found it at last, I was out at Gun Cliff one May afternoon, not even thinking of crocs, but of my empty stomach, for I'd had nothing to eat all day.

The tide was coming in, and I'd almost got back home when I slipped on a ledge covered with seaweed. I come down hard on my hands and knees, and as I pushed myself up I felt a ridge of knobs under my hand. Just like that, I was touching a long line of verteberries.

It was so simple I wasn't even surprised. I was relieved to find that croc, for it proved there were more than one, and that I could make a living from them. That second croc brought money, respect, and a new gentleman.

It was a week or two after we'd removed the croc to the workshop. I was meant to be cleaning it, but there'd been a storm the night before, and a small landslip had appeared under Black Ven that I wanted to look over. There were no men about, and Miss Elizabeth had a cold, and Joe was counting tacks or blacking wood or whatever it is upholsterers are meant to do, so it was just me upon beach. I was scrabbling about in the landslip, the lias mud pushing under my nails and lining my shoes, when the sound of clacking stones made me look up. Along the beach from Charmouth a man come, riding on a black horse. He was silhouetted against the bright sunlight, so it was hard to make him out, but when he got closer I saw the horse was a mare, a plodder, and the man wore a cloak over sloped shoulders, and a top hat, and carried a sack at his side. Once I saw the sack was blue I knew it was William Buckland.

I doubted he recognised me, though I knew him: he used to buy curies from Pa when I was younger. I remembered him best for that blue sack he always carried with him to put specimens in. It was made of heavy material--just as well, since it was always bulging with rocks Mr Buckland had picked up. He would show them to Pa, who could see no use in them as they held no fossils. But Mr Buckland remained enthusiastic about his rocks, as he was about everything.

He had grown up just a few miles away in Axminster, and knew Lyme well, though now he lived in Oxford, where he taught geology. He had also taken his orders, though I doubted any church would have him. William Buckland was too unpredictable to be a vicar.

He had been along to look at the crocodile skull back when we'd showed it in the Assembly Rooms, but though he'd smiled at me, he'd spoken only to Miss Philpot. Two years later, when the croc was united, head and body, and cleaned and sold to Lord Henley, I heard Mr Buckland went to see it at Colway Manor. And since the gentlemen had come to hunt upon beach, I saw him occasionally amongst them. He had never paid much attention to me, though, so I was astonished now to hear him shout, "Mary Anning!

Just the girl I wanted to see!"

No one had ever called out my name that enthusiastically. I stood up, confused, then quickly tugged at the hem of my skirt, which I'd tucked into my waist to keep it out of the mud. I often did that when the beach was empty. It wouldn't do for Mr Buckland to see my knobby ankles and muddy calves.

"Sir?" I bobbed a sort of curtsy, though it weren't very graceful. There weren't many I curtsied to in Lyme--just Lord Henley, and him I didn't want to now I understood that he'd sold on my croc and made such a lot more money than he'd ever paid us for it.

Him I would scarcely bend my knee for now, even if Miss Philpot hissed at me to be polite.

Mr Buckland got down from his horse and stumbled across the pebbles. The mare must have been so used to his constant stopping that she just stood there without having to be tied up. "I heard you found another monster, and I've come all the way from Oxford to see it," he declared, his eyes already scanning the landslip. "I cancelled my last lectures just to come early." As he talked he never stopped moving about and peering at things.

He picked up a clod of mud, studied it, dropped it, and picked up another. Each time he stooped I got a glimpse of the bald spot on top of his head. He had a round face like a baby's, with big lips and sparkling eyes, and sloping shoulders and a little belly. He made me want to laugh, even when he hadn't made a joke.

He was looking eager and expectant, gazing here and there, and I realised he thought the croc was still on the beach. "It ain't here, sir. We got it back at the workshop.

I'm cleaning it," I added with pride.

"Are you, now? Well done, well done." Mr Buckland looked disappointed for a moment that he wouldn't see the croc right there, but he soon recovered. "Let us go to your workshop, then, Mary, and on the way you can show me where you dug up the creature."

As we started along the beach towards Lyme, I noted all the hammers and bags hanging off his poor, patient horse. There was also, tied to the bridle and flopping against the horse's side, a dead seagull. "Sir," I said, "what you doing with that gull?"

"Ah, I'm going to have the kitchen at the Three Cups roast it for my dinner! I am eating my way through the animal kingdom, you see, and have had such things as hedgehogs and field mice and snakes, yet in all this time I haven't had a common gull."

"You've

eaten

mice!"

"Oh, yes. They are rather good on toast."

I wrinkled my nose at the thought, and at the smell of the bird. "But--the gull stinks, sir!"

Mr Buckland sniffed. "Does it?" For such a keen observer of the world, he often overlooked the obvious. "Never mind, I'll have them boil it up, and use the skeleton for my lectures. Now, what have you found today?"

Mr Buckland got very excited by the things I showed him--some golden ammos, a fish's scaly tail I would give to Miss Elizabeth, and a verteberry the size of a guinea. He asked so many questions, mixing in his own thoughts as he did, that I begun to feel like a pebble rolled back and forth in the tide. Then he insisted we turn round and go back to the landslip to look for more. The mare and I followed him until he stopped suddenly, just a stone's throw from the slip, and said, "No, no, I won't have time--I'm to meet Doctor Carpenter at the Three Cups shortly. Let's come back this afternoon."

"Can't, sir--the tide'll be in."

Mr Buckland looked puzzled, as if a high tide were nothing to consider.

"We can't reach the landslip along this side of the beach when the tide's high," I explained. "Because of the cliffs bulging out there. The beach gets cut off."

"What about coming from the Charmouth end?"

I shrugged. "We could--but we'd have to go all the way round along the road to get to Charmouth first. Or take the cliff path--but that's not stable now, as you can see, sir." I nodded towards the landslip.

"We can ride my mare to Charmouth--that's what she's here for. She'll take us quick as you like."

I hesitated. Though I had accompanied gentlemen upon beach, I had never ridden on a horse with one. The townsfolk would certainly have things to say about that. Though Mr Buckland's high spirits seemed innocent to me, they might not to others. Besides, I didn't like being upon beach at high tide, hemmed in between cliff and sea. If there were another slip there was nowhere to escape to.

It was hard arguing with Mr Buckland, for his enthusiasm ran roughshod over everything. However, I soon discovered he changed his mind so often that by the time he reached Lyme he'd had about a dozen other ideas of how to spend the afternoon, and we didn't return to the landslip at all that day.

Mr Buckland didn't get to see where I'd dug up the second croc, as the tide had covered the ledge by the time we passed it. I did show him the cliff where the first one had come from, though, and he made a little sketch. He kept stopping to look at things--silly, some of them, like ammo impressions in the rock ledges that he had surely seen many times before--so I had to remind him of Doctor Carpenter waiting for him at the Three Cups, as well as the much more interesting specimen sitting in the workshop. "Did you know, sir," I added, "that Doctor Carpenter saved my life when I were a baby?"

"Did he, now? That is what doctors often do--dose babies when they have fevers."

"Oh, it was more than that, sir. I'd been struck by lightning, see, and Doctor Carpenter told my parents to put me in a bath of lukewarm water--"

Mr Buckland halted on the rock he was about to jump from. "You were struck by lightning?" he cried, his eyes wide and delighted.

I stopped as well, embarrassed now that I had brought it up. I did not normally talk about the lightning to anyone, but had wanted to show off to this clever Oxford gentleman. This was the only thing I could think of that would impress him. It was silly, really, for it turned out later I were more than a match for him when it come to finding and identifying fossils, and his feeble grasp of anatomy sometimes made me laugh. I didn't know that at the time, though, and so I spent an uncomfortable time being questioned by him about what had happened to me in that field when I were a baby.

It did have its effect, though, for Mr Buckland clearly respected me for my experience. "That is truly remarkable, Mary," he said at last. "God spared you, and gave you an experience almost unique in the world. Your body housed the lightning and clearly benefited from it." He looked me up and down, and I blushed with the attention.

At last we got back, and I left Mr Buckland in the workshop, hopping round the crocodile and calling out questions to me even as I went up to the kitchen. Mam was at the range, boiling another family's linens. Doing laundry brought her just enough money for coal to keep the fire going so that she could wash another set of linens. She never liked it when I pointed out this circle to her.

"Who's that downstairs?" she demanded now, hearing Mr Buckland's voice. "You get tuppence off him to see it?"

I shook my head. "Mr Buckland's not the tuppence type."

"Course he is. You don't let anyone see that thing without paying. Penny for the poor, tuppence for the rich."

"You ask him, then."

Mam frowned. "I will." Handing me the paddle she used to stir the linens, she wiped her hands on her apron and headed downstairs. I poked at the washing, happy enough for a little break from Mr Buckland's questions--though it would have been funny to see Mam try to cope with him. She was fine with some of the other gentlemen. Henry De La Beche, for instance, she bossed about like another son. But William Buckland defeated even my mam. She come up a time later, exhausted from his constant chatter, and without tuppence. She shook her head. "Your pa used to tell me when that man come to the workshop, he'd give up getting any work done and settle back for a sleep while Mr Buckland went on. Now, he wants you back down to tell him about the cleaning and what we're going to do with it. Tell him we want a good price, and don't want being cheated by a gentleman again!"

When I come in Mr Buckland was leaving by the door that led onto Cockmoile Square. "Oh, Mary, I'll just be a moment. I'm fetching Doctor Carpenter here to see this.

And a few others this afternoon who I'm sure will be most interested in it."

"Just as long as it's not Lord Henley!" I called after him.

"Why not Lord Henley?"

I explained about the first croc, with its monocle, waistcoat and straightened tail as Miss Philpot had described it. "That idiot!" Mr Buckland cried. "He should have sold it to Oxford or the British Museum rather than to Bullock's. I'm sure I could have convinced either to take it. I shall do so with this one."

Without asking, Mr Buckland took over the selling of the croc from Mam and Miss Elizabeth. Before Mam could stop him he'd written enthusiastic letters to possible buyers. She were cross at first, but not once he'd found us a rich gentleman in Bristol who paid us forty pounds for it--the museums having said no. That made up for all that Mam and me had to put up with from Mr Buckland. For he was about all summer, fired with the idea of crocodiles entombed in the cliffs and ledges, waiting to be freed. While we had ours in the workshop, he was in and out all day as if the room were his, bringing with him gentlemen who poked about, measuring and sketching and discussing my croc. I noticed during all the talk, Mr Buckland never once called it a crocodile. He was like Miss Elizabeth that way. It made me begin to accept it were something else--though until we knew what that was, I would still call it a crocodile.

One day when it were just Mr Buckland and me in the workshop, he asked if he could clean a bit of the croc himself. He was always keen to try out new things. I surrendered my brushes and blade, for I couldn't say no to him, but I feared he would do real damage. He didn't, but that was because he kept stopping and examining and talking about the croc till I wanted to scream. We needed to eat; we needed to pay the rent. We still had debts of Pa's to pay, and the thought of ending up in the workhouse never left us.

We couldn't spend the time talking. We needed to sell the croc.

Finally I managed to interrupt him. "Sir," I said, "let me do the work and you do the talking, or this creature will never be ready."

"You're quite right, Mary, of course you are." Mr Buckland handed me the blade, then sat back to watch me scrape along one of the ribs, freeing and brushing away the limestone that clung to it. Slowly a clear line emerged, and because I went at it carefully, the rib weren't nicked or scored, but smooth and whole. For once he was quiet, and that made me ask the question I'd been wanting to for several days now. "Sir," I said, "is this one of the creatures Noah brought on his ark?"

Mr Buckland looked startled. "Well, now, Mary, why do you ask that?"

He didn't go chatting on as he normally would, and his waiting for me to speak made me shy. I concentrated on the rib. "Dunno, sir, I just thought..."

"What did you think?"

Maybe he had forgotten I weren't one of his students, but just a girl working to live. Still, for a moment I acted the student. "Miss Philpot showed me pictures of crocodiles drawn by Cruver--Cuver--the Frenchman who does all those studies of animals."

"Georges

Cuvier?"

"Yes, him. So we compared his drawings to this and found it were different in so many ways. Its snout is long and pointed like a dolphin's, while a croc's is blunt. And it's got paddles instead of claws, and they're turned outward rather than forward the way a croc's legs are. And of course, that big eye. No crocodile has eyes like that. So Miss Philpot and I wondered what it could be if it's not a croc. Then I heard you and a gentleman you brought here the other day, Reverend Conybeare. You was talking about the Flood--" actually they'd used the words "deluge" and "diluvian", and I'd had to ask Miss Elizabeth what they meant "- and it made me wonder: if this ain't a crocodile, which Noah would've had on the ark, then what is it? Did God make something that was on the ark we don't know about? So that's why I'm asking, sir."

Mr Buckland was silent for longer than I thought he could ever manage. I begun to worry he didn't understand what I meant, that I was too uneducated to make sense to an Oxford scholar. So I asked again, a slightly different question. "Why would God make creatures that don't exist any more?"

Mr Buckland looked at me with his big eyes, and I saw there a flickering worry.

"You are not the only person to ask this question, Mary," he said. "Many learned men are discussing it. Cuvier himself believes there is such a thing as the extinction of certain animals, in which they die away completely. I am not so sure of that, however. I cannot see why God would want to kill off what He has created." Then he brightened, and the worry left his eyes. "My friend the Reverend Conybeare says that while the Scriptures tell us that God created Heaven and Earth, they don't describe how He did it.

That is open to interpretation. And that is why I'm here--to study this remarkable creature, and find more of them to study, and through careful contemplation arrive at an answer. Geology is always to be used in the service of religion, to study the wonders of God's creation and marvel at His genius." He ran a hand over the croc's spine. "God in His infinite wisdom has peppered this world with mysteries for men to solve. This is one of them, and I am hon-?floured to take on the task."

His words sounded fine, but he had given no answer. Perhaps there was no answer. I thought for a moment. "Sir, do you think the world was created in six days, the way the Bible says?"

Mr Buckland waggled his head--not a yes or a no. "It has been suggested that 'day'

is a word that should not be interpreted literally. If one thinks instead of each day as an epoch during which God created and perfected different parts of Heaven and Earth, then some of the tensions between geology and the Bible disappear. After five epochs, during which all of the layering of rock and the fossilisation of animals occurred, then man was created. That is why there are no human fossils, you see. And once there were people, on the sixth 'day', the Flood came, and when it subsided, it left the world as we see it today, in all its grandeur."

"Where did all the water go?"

Mr Buckland paused, and I saw again that flicker of uncertainty in his eyes. "Back into the clouds from whence the rain came," he replied.

I knew I should believe him, as he taught at Oxford, but his answers did not feel complete. It was like having a meal and not getting quite enough to eat. I went back to cleaning the croc and did not ask more questions. It seemed I was always going to feel a little hollowed out round my monsters.

Mr Buckland stayed at the Three Cups in Lyme for much of the summer, long after the second crocodile had been cleaned, packed and sent to Bristol. He often called for me at Cockmoile Square, or asked me to meet him upon beach. He assumed I would accompany him and attend him, showing him where fossils could be found, sometimes finding them for him. He was particularly keen to find another monster, which he would take back to Oxford for his collection. While I wanted to find one too, I were never sure what would happen if we did discover one while out together. I had the eye and was more likely to spot it first. Would that mean Mr Buckland should pay me for it? It were never clear, as we didn't talk about money, though he was quick to thank me when I found curies for him. Even Mam didn't mention it. Mr Buckland seemed to be above money, as a scholar ought to be, living in a world where it didn't matter.

By then Joe was well into his apprenticeship and never come out with me unless there was heavy lifting or hammering to do. Sometimes Mam come with us, and sat knitting while we ranged round her. But Mr Buckland wanted to go farther than she did, and she had laundry to do and the house to look after, and the shop--for we still set out a table of curies in front of the workshop, the way Pa used to, and Mam sold 'em to visitors.

Other times Miss Elizabeth went hunting with us. It weren't as it had been with the other gentlemen, though, where she and I had laughed at the men behind their backs when they kept making beginner's mistakes, picking up beef or thinking a bit of fossilised wood was a bone. Mr Buckland was smarter, and kinder too, and I could see Miss Elizabeth liked him. I felt sometimes that she and I were two women competing for his attention, for I weren't a child any more. I would look up from my hunting and see her eyes lingering on him, and want to tease her about it, but knew it would hurt her. Miss Elizabeth was clever, which Mr Buckland appreciated. She could talk to him about fossils and geology, and read some of the scientific papers he lent her. But she was five years older than him, too old to start a family, and without the money or the looks to tempt him anyway. Besides, he was in love with rocks, and would fondle a pretty bit of quartz more likely than flirt with a lady. Miss Elizabeth hadn't a chance. Not that I did, either.

When we were together she become quieter, and sharper when she did speak.

Then she made excuses, leaving us to walk farther down the beach, and I would see her in the distance, her back very straight, even when she stooped to examine something. Or she would say she preferred to hunt at Pinhay Bay or Monmouth Beach rather than by Black Ven, and disappear altogether.

Mostly, then, Mr Buckland and me were alone. Though we were fixed only on finding curies, our being together so often was too much even for Lyme folk. Eventually town gossip caught up with us--fuelled, I was sure, by Captain Cury. In the years since the landslip that almost killed him and me and buried the first crocodile, he had let me be.

But he had never managed to find himself a complete croc, and still liked to spy on what I was doing. Once I begun hunting with Mr Buckland, Captain Cury got jealous. He would make sly comments as he passed us upon beach, clanging his spade against the rock ledge. "Having fun here on your own, you two?" he'd say. "Enjoy being alone?"

Mr Buckland mistook Captain Cury's attention as interest, and hurried over to show him the fossils we'd found, and baffle him with scientific terms and theories.

Captain Cury stood there uncomfortable, then made an excuse to get away. He loped down the beach, sneering at me over his shoulder, ready to tell everyone that he'd seen us together.

I ignored the talk, but one day Mam overheard someone in the Shambles calling me a gentleman's whore. She marched straight down to Church Cliffs where Mr Buckland and I were prising out the jaw of a crocodile. "Get your things and come back with me," she ordered, ignoring Mr Buckland's greeting.

"But, Mam, we've only an hour left to dig till the tide's in. Look, you can see all the teeth here."

"Come away, you. Do as I say." Mam made me feel guilty when I hadn't even done anything. I stood up quick and brushed the mud off my skirt. Mam glared at Mr Buckland. "I don't want you out here alone with my daughter." I had never heard her be so rude to a gentleman.

Luckily Mr Buckland was not easily offended. Perhaps it was because he misunderstood her, for he was not the sort of man to think as the town did. "Mrs Anning, we have found a most splendid jaw!" he cried. "Here, feel the teeth, they are as even as a comb's. I promise you, I'm not wasting Mary's time. She and I are engaged in tremendous scientific discovery."

"I don't care nothing for your scientific so-and-so," Mam muttered. "I've my daughter's reputation to think of. This family's been through enough already--we don't need Mary's prospects ruined by a gentleman with no concern other than what he can get out of her."

Mr Buckland turned to look at me as if he'd never thought of me in that way before. I flushed and hunched my shoulders to hide my breasts. Then he looked down at his own chest, as if suddenly reconsidering himself. It would be comical, if it weren't already tragical.

Mam begun picking her way back across the beach, skirting pools of water.

"Come along, Mary," she said over her shoulder.

"Wait, ma'am," Mr Buckland called. "Please. I have the greatest respect for your daughter. I would never want to compromise her reputation. Is it our being alone that is the problem? For that is easily solved. I shall find us a chaperone. If I ask at the Three Cups I'm sure they can spare us someone."

Mam stopped but didn't look round. She was thinking. So was I. Mam's words had given me an idea about myself I had never really considered. I had prospects. A gentleman could be interested in me. I might not always be so poor and needy.

"All right," Mam said at last. "If Miss Elizabeth or me ain't with you, you take someone else. Come, Mary."

I picked up my basket and hammer.

"But what about this jaw? Mary?" Mr Buckland looked a little frantic.

I walked backwards so I could look at him. "You have a go at it, sir. You been collecting fossils all these years, you don't need me."

"But I do, Mary, I do!"

I smiled. Swinging my basket, I turned and followed Mam.

That was how Fanny Miller come back into my life. When Mr Buckland collected me from home the next morning, Fanny was hovering behind him, looking about as miserable as a coachman in the rain. She kept her eyes on her boots, scuffing them on the cobblestones of Cockmoile Square to get the mud off. Like me, she were growing into a young woman, her curves a little softer than mine, her face the shape of an egg, framed by a battered bonnet trimmed with a blue ribbon to match her eyes. Though poor, she was so pretty I wanted to slap her.

Mr Buckland didn't seem to notice that, though, nor the frosty look that passed between her and me. "There, you see," he said, "I've brought us a chaperone. She works in the Three Cups' kitchen, but they said they could spare her for a few hours while the tide is out." He beamed, clearly pleased with himself. "What is your name, my girl?"

"Fanny," she said, so soft I weren't sure Mr Buckland even heard.

I sighed, but there was nothing I could do. After all the fuss Mam made about him getting someone to come out with us, I couldn't complain about his choice. I would just have to put up with her--and she with me. Fanny were sure to be just as unhappy as I was that she had to come upon beach with us, but she needed the work, and would do as she was told.

We went back to the jaw in Church Cliffs, Fanny trailing behind us. As we worked she sat some way away, sifting through the stones at her feet. Maybe she still liked shiny pebbles. She looked so bored and frightened I almost pitied her.

So did Mr Buckland. Perhaps he felt idleness was an evil anyone would want to avoid. When he saw her playing with the stones he went over to talk

"undergroundology", as he liked to call geology. "Here--Fanny, is it?" he said. "Would you like me to tell you what those stones are you're arranging? Most of what you've got there is limestone and flint, but that pretty white bit is quartz, and the brown with the stripe is sandstone. There are several different layers of rock along this beach, you see, like this." He took up a stick and drew in the sand the different layers of granite, limestone, slate, sandstone and chalk. "All over Great Britain, and indeed on the Continent as well, we are discovering these layers of rock, always in the same order. Isn't that surprising?"

When Fanny did not respond, he said, "Perhaps you would like to come and see what we're digging out."

Fanny approached reluctantly, glancing up at the cliff face. She seemed not to have overcome her fear of falling rocks.

"Do you see this jaw?" Mr Buckland ran his finger along it. "Beautiful, isn't it?

The snout is broken off, but the rest is intact. It will make an excellent model to use during my lectures on fossil discoveries." He peered at Fanny as if to savour her response, and looked puzzled when she screwed up her face with disgust. Mr Buckland found it hard to understand that others didn't feel as he did about fossils and rocks.

"You saw the creatures Mary discovered when they were on display in town, did you not?" he persisted.

Fanny shook her head.

He tried once more to draw her in. "Perhaps you would like to help? You may hold the hammers. Or Mary can show you how to look for other fossils."

"No, thank you, sir. I've my own work." As she turned to go back to her safe seat away from the cliff, Fanny's face was full of spite. If I were younger I would have pinched her. But she had punishment enough, being out upon beach with us, her presence allowing for the discovery of the very things she despised most. She must have hated that, and would have preferred to scrub any number of pots in the kitchen of the Three Cups.

Later Miss Elizabeth come along, hunting on her own. She frowned at Fanny, who now had out some lace she was making--though how she could keep it clean with so much mud about I didn't know. "What is she doing here?" Miss Elizabeth demanded.

"Chaperone," I said.

"Oh!" Miss Elizabeth watched her for a moment, then shook her head. "Poor girl,"

she murmured, before passing on.

It's your fault she's here, I thought. If you weren't so funny about Mr Buckland you could stay with us and release Fanny from her torment. And my torment too that she's sitting there reminding me of the sort of woman I'll never be.

Fanny was with us all summer. Usually she sat on rocks away from us, or followed at a distance when we were wandering. Though she didn't complain, I knew she hated it when we went farther, to Charmouth or beyond. She preferred remaining close to Lyme, by Gun Cliff or Church Cliffs. Then a friend might come out to see her, and Fanny cheered up and become more confident. The two would sit and peek round their bonnets at us and whisper and giggle.

Mr Buckland tried to interest Fanny in what we found, or to show her what to look for, but she always said she had other things to do, and brought out lace or sewing or knitting. "She thinks they're the Devil's works," I finally explained in a low voice, when Fanny had once again rebuffed him and gone to sit with her lace. "They scare her."

"But that's absurd!" Mr Buckland said. "They are God's creatures from the past, and there is nothing to be frightened of."

He got up from his knees as if he would go to her, but I caught his arm. "Please, sir, leave her be. It's better that way."

When I looked over at Fanny she was staring at my hand on Mr Buckland's sleeve. She always seemed to notice when his hand touched mine as he passed me a fossil, or when I grabbed his elbow when he stumbled. She gasped outright when Mr Buckland hugged me the afternoon we managed to get the croc jaw out of the cliff. In that way her accompanying us made things worse, for I suspect Fanny spread plenty of gossip. We might have been better off alone, without a witness to report back everything she saw that she didn't understand. I still had funny looks from townspeople, and laughter behind my back.

Poor Fanny. I should be kinder to her, for she paid a price, going out with us.

My trade is best done in bad weather. Rain flushes fossils out of the cliffs, and storms scrub the ledges clean of seaweed and sand so more can be seen. Joe may have left fossils for upholstery because of the weather, but I was like Pa--I never minded the cold or the wet, as long as I was finding curies.

Mr Buckland also wanted to go out even when it was raining. Fanny had to come with us, and would huddle wretched in her shawl, curling up amongst the boulders to shelter against the wind. We were often the only folk upon beach then, for in poor weather visitors preferred to go to the bath houses, which had heated water, or to play cards and read the papers at the Assembly Rooms, or to drink at the Three Cups. Only serious hunters went out in the rain.

One rainy day towards the end of the summer, I was upon beach with Mr Buckland and Fanny. There was no one else on that stretch of shore, though Captain Cury passed by at one point, nosing about to see what we were doing. Mr Buckland had discovered a ridge of bumps not far from where we'd dug out the jaw in Church Cliffs, and thought they might be a row of verteberries from the same animal.

I was chiselling away at it to try and uncover the bones when Mr Buckland left my side. After a minute Fanny come to stand close by, and I knew Mr Buckland must be pissing in the water. He was always careful not to embarrass me, and slipped off to do his business far enough away that I didn't have to see. I was used to him doing that, but it always bothered Fanny, and it were the one time she come up to the cliff by me. Even after several weeks in his company, she was still a little scared of Mr Buckland. His friendliness and constant questions were too demanding for someone like Fanny.

I felt sorry for her. The rain was coming down hard, and dripping on her face from her bonnet rim. It was too wet for her to sew or knit, and there's nothing worse than having nothing to do in the rain. "Why don't you just turn away when he's down there?" I said, trying to be helpful. "He's not going to wave it in your face. He's too much of a gentleman for that."

Fanny shrugged. "You ever seen one?" she said after a moment. I think it was the first question she'd asked me in ten years. Maybe the rain had wore her down.

I thought of the belemnite Miss Elizabeth showed James Foot on this beach years before and smiled. "No. Just Joe's, when he were little. You?"

I didn't think she would answer, but then she said, "Once, at the Three Cups, a man got so drunk he dropped his trousers in the kitchen, thinking it were the privy!"

We both laughed. For a second I wondered if we might be starting to get on better.

We'd no chance for that. There were no warning, no pebbles raining down or the groan of stone splitting from stone. It were that sudden that one moment Fanny and I were laughing about men's parts by the cliff, and the next the cliff just dropped, and I was knocked down and buried in the thick, rocky clay.

Though I don't remember doing it, I'd thrown my hand up to my mouth as the cliff come down on me, and that made a little space for me to breathe in. I couldn't see anything, and though I struggled I couldn't move at all, for the clay was cold and wet and heavy, and it held me fast. I couldn't even call out. All I could do was think that I was going to die and wonder what God would say to me when He met me.

There was a long, long time when nothing happened. Then I heard a scrabbling and felt hands clawing at me and wiping my eyes, and I opened them and saw Mr Buckland's terrified face, and I thought maybe I would not meet God yet.

"Oh, Mary!" he cried.

"Sir. Get me out, sir!"

"I--I--" Mr Buckland pulled at the rocks and mud but could not move them. "It's too heavy, Mary. I can't get you with no tools." He was in a kind of daze, as if he couldn't think straight.

We heard a cry then. We had forgot about Fanny. She was just a few feet from us, and weren't so heavily buried as me, but there was blood on her face. She begun to scream, and Mr Buckland jumped up and went to her. The clay was looser round her and he managed to shift it enough that he could pull her out. He wiped the blood from her face, and in doing so knocked the bonnet from her head, for he was scared and clumsy. It got caught up in a gust of wind and rolled away down the beach. Losing her bonnet seemed to upset Fanny more than anything else. "My bonnet!" she cried. "I need my bonnet. Mam will kill me if I lose it!" Then she screamed again as Mr Buckland tried to move her.

"Her leg is broken," Mr Buckland panted. "I'm going to have to leave you to get help."

At that moment part of the cliff further along crumbled and crashed to the ground.

Fanny screamed again. "Don't leave me, sir, please don't leave me in this godforsaken place!"

I did not want to be left either, but I did not cry out. "Best to carry her, sir, if you can. At least you can save one of us."

Mr Buckland looked horrified. "Oh, I don't think I should do that. It wouldn't be proper." It seemed even he, who ate field mice and carried a bright blue sack and pissed in the sea, was uneasy about holding a girl in his arms. But now was not the time for worrying about what was proper.

"Put an arm round her shoulders and one under her knees and lift, sir," I coached.

"She's a little thing--you should be able to carry her, even a scholar like you."

Mr Buckland did what I said and heaved Fanny into his arms. She screamed again, in pain and shame. Letting her arms flop wide, she turned her head away from him.

"For God's sake, Fanny, put your arms round him!" I cried. "Help the man or he'll never get you back."

Fanny obeyed me, throwing her arms round his neck and burying her head against his chest.

"Take her to the bath house--that's the closest place--and send people straight back with spades." I wouldn't normally direct a gentleman so, but Mr Buckland seemed to have lost his wits. "Hurry, please, sir. I can't bear being alone like this."

As he nodded, another section of cliff fell away with a crash. Mr Buckland flinched, terror written all over his face. I fastened my eyes on his. "Sir, pray for me. And if I die, tell Mam and Joe--"

"D- d- don't say such a thing, Mary. I'll be back shortly." Mr Buckland would not listen, but staggered away, Fanny gazing at me with glazed eyes over his shoulder. Now that she had surrendered to his arms she was beyond care. Later Doctor Carpenter would set her leg, but the break was awkward and never healed properly, and left her with one leg shorter than the other. She could never walk far or stand for long, and could never again come out upon beach--not that she would want to. Whenever I saw her hobbling down Broad Street to the Three Cups, I ducked my head to avoid that fearful blue gaze.

Course I didn't know any of that then, held fast in the landslip. I watched Mr Buckland weaving down the beach with his burden, not going fast enough for me, and wondered why it was that the pretty ones were always rescued before the plain. That was how the world worked: with her big eyes and dainty features, Fanny did not get stuck, whereas I was caught in the mud, the cliff threatening to crumble on top of me.

There was a lot of time to think. I thought of Mr Buckland, and how odd it were that for an ordained man so interested in what God had been up to in the past, he hadn't been much comfort with prayers, but run away from them. I closed my eyes and said a long prayer myself, for God to spare me, to let me live on to help Mam and Joe, to find more crocs, to have enough to eat and coal to burn, even to have a husband and children one day. "And please, God, make Mr Buckland a runner rather than a walker today. Make him find someone quick, and come back." Although Mr Buckland was happy wandering miles along the cliff, and regularly walked to Axminster and back while in Lyme, he did not hurry. He had a scholar's belly on him, and I worried that with Fanny in his arms he would not get back quick enough to save me.

It was quiet now. The wind had died down, and a fine misty rain sprayed my face.

Now and then I heard the faint skitter of more debris tumbling down the cliff to the ground. I couldn't see it because it were behind me and I couldn't turn my head all the way round. That was the worst, hearing it and not knowing how close it was, or if it would bury me.

The mud that held me was cold and heavy and pressing on my chest, making it hard to breathe. I closed my eyes for a bit, thinking that sleep might make the time go faster. But I couldn't sleep, so instead I followed Mr Buckland in my mind as he went back to Lyme. Now he's passing where we found the first croc, I thought. Now he's passing the ledge with the ammo impressions. Now he's reached the bend where the path starts. Now he's in sight of Jefferd's Baths. Maybe Mr Jefferd is there and will come running, faster than Mr Buckland. I traced the path there and back again--and it was not so far back to Lyme--but no one come.

I opened my eyes. Mr Buckland was a dot along Church Cliffs. I couldn't believe he hadn't got farther. But then, it was hard to say how much time had passed--it could have been ten minutes or hours. I looked the other way, down the beach towards Charmouth. There were no boats out, or fishermen checking crab pots, for it was too rough. There was no one at all. And the tide had turned, and was slowly creeping up.

I gave up looking for help, and begun to notice things closer to me. The landslip had caused a churning up of rocks caught in an ooze of blue-grey clay. My eyes flicked over the stones near to me and come to rest on a familiar shape about four feet from me: a ring of overlapping bony scales the size of my fist. A croc's eye. It were like it was staring straight at me. I cried out with the surprise of seeing it. Then, several feet past the eye, there was a movement. It was only tiny, but I cried out again, and it moved again. It was just a little pink spot sticking out of the clay, and with the rain in my eyes it was hard to see what it was. I wondered if it were a crab, scrabbling about in the mud.

"Hey!" I called, and it moved. It was not a crab, but a finger. I felt so relieved and sick at the same time that I think I fainted. When I come to I looked at the spot again, and it wasn't moving. I cleared my throat.

"Who's that?" I said, but not loud enough. "Who's that?" I repeated, as loud as I could. The finger moved. I was so happy not to be alone that I laughed aloud.

"Joe? Is it Joe?" The finger didn't move.

"Mam? Miss Philpot?"

No movement. I knew it couldn't have been any of them, for I would have known they were upon beach. But who else would be out in such weather? I supposed it could have been one of the children from Lyme, come to spy on Mary Anning and the man she attended, hoping to see something scandalous that they could report back on. But it seemed unlikely. We would have spotted them if they were upon beach. Unless they'd been up on the cliff--which meant they'd come down with the slip. It was a miracle they was alive.

It was thinking of the cliff and landslips that made me realise who it must be.

"Captain Cury?" I remembered now that I had seen him earlier.

Even as the finger wriggled, I saw the handle of his spade, poking out of the clay that had buried him. I was so glad he was there that any spite I felt towards him vanished.

"Captain Cury! Mr Buckland's gone to get help. They'll be back to dig us out."

The finger moved, but less than before.

"Was you up on the cliff and come down with the slip?"

The finger didn't move.

"Captain Cury, can you hear me? Are your bones broke? Fanny's leg is broke, I think. Mr Buckland's taken her with him. He'll come back soon." I was chattering on to mask my terror.

The finger stayed stiff, pointing up at the sky. I knew what that meant, and begun to cry. "Don't go! Stay with me! Please stay, Captain Cury!"

Between me and Captain Cury the croc eye watched us both. Captain Cury and I are going to be like the croc, I thought. We will become fossils, trapped upon beach forever.

After a while I stopped looking at Captain Cury's finger, now as still as any rock caught in the clay. I couldn't bear to watch the tide steadily rising. Instead I gazed up into the flat white sky, a few pewter clouds swimming about in it. After spending so much of my life looking down at stones, it was strange to look up into emptiness. I spotted a gull circling high above. It seemed it would never get closer, but would always be a dot hovering far away. I kept my eyes fixed on it, and did not look at the finger or the croc again.

It was so quiet I wanted to make a noise to break the spell. I wanted the lightning to pass through me and jolt me into life, for I was feeling the opposite of that sensation--a slow darkness was creeping through my body.

There had been plenty of deaths in our family--Pa and all the children. I spent most of my time collecting what were dead bodies of animals. But I had not thought much of my own death before. Even when I had been visiting Lady Jackson I'd really thought more of her passing than mine, and treating death as a drama to revel in. But dying was no drama. Dying was cold and hard and painful, and dull. It went on too long.

I was exhausted and growing bored with it. Now I had too much time to think about whether I was going to die from the tide coming in and drowning me like Lady Jackson, or the mud pressing the air out of me as it had Captain Cury, or a falling rock striking me.

I couldn't think for long or it hurt too much, like touching a piece of ice. I tried to think of God instead, and how He would help me through it.

I never told anyone this, but thinking of Him then didn't make me less scared.

It was hard to breathe now with the mud so heavy. My breathing got slower, and so did the beat of my heart, and I closed my eyes.

When I come to, someone was digging at the clay round me. I opened my eyes and smiled. "Thank you. I knew you would come. Oh, thank you for coming to me."

6

A little in love with

him myself

You might think saving someone's life would bind you ever after. That is not what happened with Mary and me. I am not blaming her, but digging her out of the landslip that day, using Captain Cury's spade and racing against the tide and the rocks that rained down on either side of us, seemed to drive us apart rather than bring us closer.

It was a miracle Mary survived, and intact as well, especially given Captain Cury's terrible suffocating death just a few feet from her. She had bad bruising up and down her body, but only a few broken bones--some ribs and her collarbone. This kept her in bed a few weeks--not long enough to satisfy Doctor Carpenter, but she refused to convalesce any longer, and soon reappeared on the beach, bound up tightly to keep the bones in place.

I was amazed she was willing to go out hunting again after what she'd been through. Not only that--she did not change her habits, but went back to pacing along the base of the cliffs, where landslips could come down. When I suggested that Molly and Joseph Anning would understand if she did not want to go back to hunting, Mary declared, "I been struck by lightning and buried in a landslip and survived both. God must have other plans for me. Besides," she added, "I can't afford to stop."

On top of her father's debts, which years later the family was still struggling to clear, they now owed Doctor Carpenter. He was fond of Mary because of their shared interest in fossils, as well as for the pleasure he took from knowing his advice had saved her from the lightning strike. However, he still had to be paid for his care of Mary, and of Fanny Miller as well, as insisted on by her family. The Annings did not challenge this demand. More surprising, they did not expect William Buckland to pay for Fanny's care; nor would Molly Anning let me write to him about it on their behalf. "He can afford it more than you," I reasoned when I was visiting Mary to lend her a Bible she wanted to read while she was still in bed. "And it is because of him that Fanny was out on the beach at all."

Molly Anning did not pause while she counted a pile of pennies from the fossil table sales. "If Mr Buckland felt he ought to pay, he would have offered to before he went back to Oxford. I ain't going to chase after him for his money."

"I don't think he has thought about it one way or the other," I said. "He is a scholar, not a practical man. If put to him, though, I am sure he would honour the debt and pay Doctor Carpenter--for Mary's treatment as well as Fanny's."

"No." Molly Anning's stubbornness revealed a certain pride I had not realised she possessed. She measured most things by the coins they represented and the distance they put between the Annings and the workhouse, but in this instance I believe she understood that money was not the issue. Whether or not William Buckland was involved, the Annings had placed an innocent girl in danger, and effectively crippled her. Fanny could not now expect to marry well, or at all. Her fair looks might make up for a great deal, but most husbands at that working level of society would need a wife who was able to walk a mile. No amount of money could make up for what Fanny had lost. Molly Anning took on the debt as a sort of punishment.

Mary never talked about the half hour she was buried before I found her. But the experience changed her. I often caught in her eyes a faraway expression, as if she were listening to someone calling from the top of Black Ven, or a gull crying out at sea. Death had come and camped next to her on the beach, taking Captain Cury while sparing her, and reminding her of its presence and of her own limits. All of us begin to feel deeply our mortality at some time in our lives, but it is usually when we are older than Mary was then.

Mary's contact with death also came at a time when she was maturing. One day I helped Molly Anning remove the bandages that had bound Mary's broken bones, and discovered that under her ill-?tting dress she had a womanly figure, with her waist and breasts and hips all in good proportion. Her shoulders were perhaps a little hunched from her fascination with the ground, and her knuckles were raw, her fingers rough and cracked from use. She was not graceful, as Margaret had been at that age. But she had a fresh, bold presence that could attract men.

She had begun to sense it as well. She took more care to wash her face and hands, and asked Margaret for some of the salve she had concocted to try to save my own hands from the drying force of Blue Lias clay. Made of beeswax, turpentine, lavender and yarrow, it was useful for dressing wounds as well as chapped skin, but Mary wore it on her hands, elbows and cheeks, and I began to associate her with that scent, a curious mixture of the medicinal and the floral.

Mary's hair was always going to be a dull brown, and scrubby from the wind rather than the curled ringlets that were the fashion. But she did at least comb her fringe daily, and pull the rest into a bun which she covered with a cap and bonnet. I am not sure how much good making an effort with her looks did, for her reputation was already much compromised by her time with Mr Buckland, even with the ill-fated Fanny as companion.

The landslip accident might normally have brought Mary some sympathy, but Fanny's injuries caused much indignation amongst working people, creating sides that cast Mary as the villain. If she was trying to soften her elbows and tame her hair, it could not be for any Lyme man she fancied she could snare. She had too openly flouted the rules of what was expected from a girl in her position. Now that it had tangible consequences in the form of Fanny's broken gait, vague impressions hardened into harsh opinions.

Mary paid little attention to what others said about her, a trait in her I both admired and despaired of. Perhaps I was a little jealous that she could be so free with her contempt for society's workings in a way that a woman of my class could not. Even in a place as independent-minded as Lyme, I was all too aware of the judgements made if one stepped too far out of place.

Perhaps Mary did not care for the sort of life Lyme had decided for her. She had spent a great deal of time with people above her station--me most of all, but also William Buckland, and various gentlemen who made their way to Lyme, having heard of or seen the creatures Mary had found. It rather turned her head, and raised her hopes that she might be able to move up in the world. I do not think she ever seriously considered any of the men as potential suitors: most gentlemen viewed her as little more than a knowledgeable servant. William Buckland was more appreciative of her talent, but was too caught up in his own head to notice her as a woman. Such a man would be deeply frustrating, as I briefly allowed myself to discover.

For Mary's interest in men piqued my own, which I had thought dead but discovered was merely dormant, a rosebush that needed but a little attention to attempt to flower. Once I invited William Buckland to dine with us at Morley Cottage so that he might look at my specimen collection. He accepted with an enthusiasm I suspected was for my fossils, yet I allowed myself to think might be directed towards me as well. For a match between him and me was not such a mad idea. Granted I was several years older than him, and too old to have many children. But it was not impossible. Molly Anning had borne her last child at the age of forty-six. William Buckland and I were of similar social standing, and intellectually suited. Of course I was not educated to his degree, but I read widely. I knew enough about geology and fossils to be a supportive wife to him in his profession.

Margaret, always quick to spot romantic potential even for an aging spinster, encouraged these thoughts by going on about Mr Buckland's vivid eyes, and nagging me about what I would wear to dinner. What began as genial interest grew to such a pitch of quiet excitement that by the appointed day my stomach was fizzing with nerves.

We waited for him for two hours, Bessy harrumphing and tossing pots about in the kitchen, before we gave in and sat down to a ruined meal that I forced myself to eat.

If nothing else, I was obliged to Bessy for making the special effort. She was already on the verge of giving notice once more, and certainly would if I refused to eat. I would also not display disappointment to my sisters, though every bite was lead in my mouth.

The next day I did not seek him out, but nonetheless came upon William Buckland on the beach, for once without Mary. He greeted me heartily, but when I mentioned being disappointed that we had not seen him the day before, he looked surprised. "Was I meant to dine with you, Miss Philpot? Are you sure? Because, you see, yesterday I heard a man had found part of a long sequence of vertebrae down at Seatown, and I had to go and see for myself. And do you know, I'm glad I did, for they are well preserved and yet quite different from Mary's creature's vertebrae. I am wondering if they might be from a different animal altogether."

Unrepentant at his social error, he also did not sense that I was upset. To him it was perfectly normal that going to see a set of unusual vertebrae would take precedence over dining with ladies.

I said nothing but "Good day, sir," and turned away. It was then I understood that only a woman beautiful enough to distract him or patient enough to put up with him would manage to marry William Buckland.

I thought that was the end of my new regard for men. I had never imagined there would be a Colonel Birch.

The summer Colonel Birch arrived in Lyme, Mary was in a peculiar state, pulled this way and that. On the one hand, the creature she and Joseph had discovered had become quite famous. Charles Konig bought the original specimen from Bullock's and put it on display at the British Museum. He named it an ichthyosaurus, which means "fish lizard", for its anatomy falls somewhere between the two. He and others studied it and published articles in which they speculated that the ichthyosaurus was a marine reptile, for it breathed in air like a mammal but swam like a fish. I read these papers, lent to me by William Buckland, with great curiosity, noting that none of them discussed the thorny questions of extinction or God's hand in the creature's disappearance. Indeed, they did not bring up religious issues at all. Perhaps they were copying Cuvier, who never mentioned God's intentions in his writings. It was a relief to me to accept the ichthyosaurus as what it was--an ancient marine reptile with its own name.

Mary found it harder, and often still called it a crocodile, as did most of the local residents, though eventually she settled on ichie. To her the new scientific name took her creature away from her even more effectively than its physical removal. Learned men were discussing it at meetings and writing about it, and Mary was excluded from their activity. She was relied upon to find the specimens, but not to take part in studying them.

And even that hunting was proving difficult--she had not found a complete ichthyosaurus in over a year, though she combed Church Cliffs and Black Ven every day.

One day I suggested we look for brittle stars and crinoids on the beach towards Seatown, several miles east of Charmouth. We did not usually go so far afield, but I thought a change of scene would do Mary good, and suggested Seatown to get her away from her endless tramping up and down the same beach in search of an elusive monster.

We chose a sunny day when the tides favoured an early start. She left behind Church Cliffs and Black Ven willingly enough, but at Gabriel's Ledge, just beyond Charmouth, she kept turning and looking behind us, as if the cliffs were calling her back. "There was a flash back there," she insisted. "Didn't you see it?"

I shook my head and continued along the beach, hoping she would follow.

"There it is again," Mary said. "Oh, look, Miss Philpot, do you think he's coming for us?"

A man was striding up the beach. Although there were other people out, taking advantage of the mild weather and the glorious morning light, he cut through them as if he knew exactly what his goal was, and it was us. He was tall and erect, and wore the high boots and long red coat of a soldier. The uniform's brass buttons winked in the sun. I am not often moved by the sight of a man, but having this one make it his clear purpose to reach us was a thrill I will long remember.

He smiled as he approached. He was a striking figure of fifty or so, with the straight military bearing so pleasing in a man, trim and upright and confident. His face was weathered, his eyes slits against the sun and wind, but he was handsome with it.

When he removed his cocked hat and bowed, I could see the parting in his bushy black hair, which was threaded with grey.

"Ladies," he announced, "I have been searching all morning for you, and am delighted to have found you at last." He put his hat back on, making the white plumes it was trimmed with waggle. His hair was so thick and wavy the hat was in danger of springing off.

I have never trusted a man who leads with his hair. Only a vain, overconfident man does that.

"I am Colonel Birch, late of the 1st Regiment of the Life Guards." He paused, looking back and forth between us, then settled his attention on Mary. "And you must be the remarkable Mary Anning who has found several ichthyosaurus specimens, is that right?"

Mary nodded, unable to stop staring at him.

Of course, anyone who knew of Mary would also know that she was young and of a low background, and there could be no mistaking me for her, with my twenty extra years etched onto my face and my finer clothes and bearing. Yet I felt the sharp dart of jealousy pierce me, that a handsome man was not striding along the beach for me.

It made me more prickly than I'd intended. "I suppose you'll be wanting her to find you one, rather like commissioning a print dealer to find you a print to hang on a particular wall."

Mary shot me an annoyed look, for such rudeness was unlike me, but Colonel Birch laughed. "As it happens, I do want Mary to help me find an ichthyosaurus, if she is willing."

"Of course, sir!"

"You will have to ask her mother and brother for permission," I said. "It wouldn't be appropriate otherwise." I couldn't hold back barbed comments.

"Oh, that don't matter--they'll say yes," Mary put in.

"Of course I will speak to your family," Colonel Birch said. "You have nothing to fear from me, Mary--nor you, Miss--"

"Philpot." Of course he assumed I was a spinster. Would a married lady be out on the beach, far from home, hunting for fossils? I stooped to pick up something from the sand. It was just a bit of beef shaped like one of the paddle bones of an ichthyosaurus, but I paid it more attention than it was due so that I wouldn't have to look at Colonel Birch.

"Let's go back and ask Mam now," Mary suggested.

"Mary, we were going to Seatown, don't you remember?" I reminded her. "To look for brittle stars and sea lilies. If you go back to Lyme we'll have to give up the day."

Colonel Birch cut in. "I could accompany you to Seatown. That's rather a long way for ladies to go on their own, isn't it?"

"Seven miles," I snapped. "We're certainly capable of walking that far. We do it all the time. We'll get the coach back at the end."

"I shall see you to the coach," Colonel Birch declared. "I would not want it on my conscience to leave you two ladies undefended."

"We don't need--"

"Oh, thank you, Colonel Birch, sir!" Mary interrupted.

'Sea lilies, did you say?" Colonel Birch said. "I have some lovely specimens of pentacrinites myself. I'll show you sometime, if you like. They're back at my hotel in Charmouth."

I frowned at the impropriety of his suggestion. Mary's judgement, however, had fallen away. "I'd like to see them," she said. "And I've other crinoids back home you be welcome to look at, sir. Crinoids and ammos, and bits of croc- ichthyosaurus, and all sorts." The girl was enamoured with him already. I shook my head and stalked off down the beach, my head lowered, pretending to hunt, though I was walking too fast to find anything. After a moment they followed.

"What is a brittle star?" Colonel Birch asked. "I have not heard of such a thing."

"It's shaped like a star, sir," Mary explained. "The centre is marked with the outline of a flower with five petals, and a long, wavy leg extends off each petal. It's hard to find one with all five legs intact. I've had a collector ask specially for one that's not broken. That's why we've come this far. Normally I stay between Lyme and Charmouth, by Black Ven and off the ledges by town."

"Is that where you have found the ichthyosauri?"

"There, and one along Monmouth Beach, just to the west of Lyme. But there might be some along here. I just haven't looked here for them. Have you seen an ichthyosaurus, sir?"

"No, but I've read about them, and seen drawings."

I

snorted.

"I am here for the summer to expand my fossil collection, Mary, and I hope you will be able to help--There!" Colonel Birch stopped. I turned to look. He reached down and picked up a bit of crinoid.

"Very good, sir," Mary said. "I was just going to have a look at that, but you beat me to it."

He held it out to her. "It is for you, Mary. I would not deprive you of such a lovely specimen. It is my gift to you."

It was indeed a fine specimen, fanning out like the lily it was named for. "Oh no, sir, it's yours," Mary said. "You found it. I could never take it from you."

Colonel Birch took her hand, laid the crinoid in it and closed her fingers around it.

"I insist, Mary." He held his hand over her fist and looked at her. "Did you know crinoids are not plants as they appear, but creatures?"

"Really, sir?" Mary was staring into his eyes. Of course she knew about crinoids.

I had taught her.

I stepped forward. "Colonel Birch, I must ask you to show proper respect or I shall require that you leave us."

Colonel Birch dropped his hand. "My apologies, Miss Philpot. The discovery of fossils excites me in ways I find hard to control."

"Control it you must, sir, or you will lose the privileges you seek."

He nodded and fell back to a respectful distance. We walked in silence for a time.

But Colonel Birch could not be quiet for long, and soon he and Mary were lagging behind while he asked her about the fossils she preferred, her method of hunting, even her thoughts on what the ichthyosaurus was. "I don't know, sir," she said of her most spectacular find. "It seems the ichie's got a bit of crocodile in it, some lizard, some fish.

And a bit of something all its own. That's what's difficult, that bit. How it fits in."

"Oh, I expect your ichthyosaurus has a place in Aristotle's Great Chain of Being,"

Colonel Birch said.

"What's that, sir?"

I tutted. She didn't need him to explain it, for I had described the theory to Mary myself. She was flirting with him. Of course he loved telling her what he knew. Men do.

"The Greek philosopher Aristotle suggested that all creatures could be placed along a scale, from the lowest plants up to the perfection that is man, in a chain of creation. So your ichthyosaurus may fall between a lizard and a crocodile in the chain, for instance."

"That is very interesting, sir." Mary paused. "But that don't explain about the bit of the ichie that's like nothing else, that don't fit in with the categories. Where does that fit in the chain, if it's different from everything else?"

Colonel Birch suddenly stopped, squatted and picked up a stone. "Is this--Oh, no, it's not. My mistake." He threw the stone into the water.

I smiled. He might dazzle with his handsome head of hair, but his grasp of knowledge was superficial, and Mary had picked it apart.

"What about you, Miss Philpot? What do you like to collect?" In two lively steps Colonel Birch had caught up with me, escaping Mary's awkward question. I did not want his attention, for I was not sure I could bear it, but I could not be impolite.

"Fish," I answered as briefly as I could.

"Fish?"

Though I did not want to converse with him, I could not help showing off a bit of my knowledge. "Primarily Eugnathus, Pholidophorus, Dapedius, and Hybodus--the last is an ancient shark," I added as his face went blank at the Latin. "Those are the genus names, of course. The different species have not yet been identified."

"Miss Philpot has a big collection of fossil fish at her home," Mary put in. "People come and look all the time, don't they, Miss Elizabeth?"

"Really? Fascinating," Colonel Birch murmured. "I shall be sure to visit as well and see your fish."

He was careful, so I could never accuse him of rudeness, but his tone bore a trace of sarcasm. He preferred the bold ichthyosaurus to the quiet fish. But then, most do. They do not understand that the clear shape and texture of a fish, with its overlapping scales, its dimpled skin, and its shapely fins, all make up a specimen of great beauty--beautiful because it is plain and definite. With his gleaming buttons and thrusting hair, Colonel Birch could never comprehend such subtlety.

"You'd best move along," I snapped, "else the tide will catch us out before we reach Seatown. Mary, if you don't stop talking you'll never find a brittle star for your collector."

Mary scowled, but I was done tolerating Colonel Birch. I turned and strode towards Seatown, blind to any fossils underfoot.

Colonel Birch was to stay for several weeks to build up his collection, taking rooms in Charmouth but coming to Lyme daily. His claim on Mary's time was sudden and absolute. She went out with him every day. To start with I accompanied them, for even if Mary didn't, I worried what the town would think. When we three were together I tried to find the comfortable rhythm I had when I was out only with Mary, where we each concentrated on our own hunting and yet felt the reassuring presence of a companion close by. That rhythm was ruined by Colonel Birch, who liked to remain with Mary and talk. It is a testament to her hunting skills that she was able to find anything at all that summer with him babbling at her side. Yet she toler-?flated him. More than tolerated--she doted on him. There was no place for me on the beach with them. I might as well have been an empty crab shell. I went out three times with them, and that was enough.