Remarkable Creatures

  “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 favor 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 patronizing 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 of October 4004 B.C. 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’s 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 gray 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 £150 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 savored 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 £23 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’s 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 creature. 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 sunburnt, 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 seawater. Our clothes are filthy by the end of the day. Often we find nothing, but we are patient and hardworking 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 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 gray 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, artifacts 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 perche
s 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, which 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 center of the room, in a grassy enclosure dotted with palm trees, depicting their habitat. We stood and stared, for these were rare sights indeed.