Remarkable Creatures (2 page)

We were to be moved on, then, like sheep shifted from one cropped field to another. And John must be our shepherd.

The next morning he laid on the breakfast table a book he had borrowed from a friend. “I thought for your summer holiday you might like to go somewhere new rather than visit our aunt and uncle in Brighton again,” he suggested. “A little tour, if you like, along the south coast. With the war with France cutting off travel to the Continent, so many more coastal resorts are springing up. There may be places you will like even more than Brighton. Eastbourne, perhaps, or Worthing. Or further afield, to Lymington, or the Dorset coast: Weymouth or Lyme Regis.” John was reciting these places as if going down a list in his head, placing a little tick beside each one as he named it. That was how his tidy solicitor’s mind worked. He had clearly thought through where he wanted us to go, though he would herd us there gently. “Have a look to see what you fancy.” John tapped the book. Although he said nothing, we all knew we were looking not simply for a holiday destination, but for a new home, where we could live in gently diminished circumstances rather than as London paupers.

When he had gone out to his chambers, I picked up the book. “ ‘
A Guide to All the Watering and Sea-Bathing Places for 1804
,’ ” I read out, for Louise’s and Margaret’s benefit. Flipping through it, I found entries on English towns in alphabetical order. Fashionable Bath had the longest entry, of course—forty-nine pages, along with a large map and a pull-out panoramic view of the city, with its even, elegant facades cupped by surrounding hills. Our beloved Brighton had twenty-three pages and a glowing report. I looked up the towns our brother had mentioned, some of which were little more than glorified fishing villages, warranting only two pages of indifferent platitudes. John had made a dot in the margin of each. I expect he had read every entry in the book and chosen those that suited best. He had done his research.

“What’s wrong with Brighton?” Margaret demanded.

I was reading about Lyme Regis then and grimaced. “Here is your answer.” I handed her the guide. “Look at what John has marked.”

“ ‘Lyme is frequented principally by persons in the middle class of life,’ ” Margaret read aloud, “ ‘who go there, not always in search of their lost health, but as frequently perhaps to heal their wounded fortunes, or to replenish their exhausted revenues.’ ” She let the book drop in her lap. “Brighton is too expensive for the Philpot sisters, then, is it?”

“You could stay here with John and his wife,” I suggested in a burst of generosity. “They could manage one of us, I expect. We may as well not all be banished to the coast.”

“Nonsense, Elizabeth, we shan’t be separated,” Margaret declared with a loyalty that made me hug her.

 

 

 

THAT SUMMER WE TOURED the coast as John had suggested, accompanied by our aunt and uncle, our future sister-in-law and her mother, and John when he could manage it. Our companions made comments like “What glorious gardens! I envy those who live here all year round and can walk in them anytime they like”; or “This circulating library is so well stocked you would think you were in London”; or “Isn’t the air here so soft and fresh? I wish I could breathe this every day of the year.” It was galling to have others judge our future so casually, especially our sister-in-law, who would be taking over the Philpot house and didn’t seriously have to consider living in Worthing or Hastings. Her comments became so irritating that Louise began excusing herself from group outings, and I made more and more tetchy remarks. Only Margaret enjoyed the novelty of the new places, even if only to laugh at the mud at Lymington or the rustic theater at Eastbourne. She liked Weymouth best, for King George’s love of the town made it more popular than the others, with several coaches a day from London and Bath, and a constant influx of fashionable people.

As for myself, I was out of sorts throughout much of the tour. Knowing you may be forced to move somewhere can ruin it as a place for a holiday. It was difficult to view a resort as anything but inferior to London. Even Brighton and Hastings, places that previously I had loved to visit, seemed lacking in spirit and grace.

By the time we reached Lyme Regis, only Louise, Margaret, and I were left: John had had to return to his chambers, and had taken his fiancée and her mother back with him, and our uncle’s gout had caught up with him, sending him and our aunt limping back to Brighton. We were escorted to Lyme by a family we’d met in Weymouth, who accompanied us on the coach and helped us to get settled at lodgings in Broad Street, the town’s main thoroughfare.

Of all the places we visited that summer, I found Lyme the most appealing. It was September by then, which is a lovely month anywhere. With its mildness and golden light it will soften even the grimmest resort. We were blessed with good weather, and with freedom from the expectations of our family. At last I could form my own opinion of where we might live.

Lyme Regis is a town that has submitted to its geography rather than forced the land to submit to it. The hills into town are so steep that coaches cannot travel down them—passengers are left at the Queen’s Arms at Charmouth or the crossroads at Uplyme and brought down in carts. The narrow road leads down to the shore, and then quickly turns its back on the sea and heads uphill again, as if it wants merely to glimpse the waves before fleeing. The bottom, where the tiny River Lym pours into the sea, forms the square in the center of town. The Three Cups—the main inn—is there, across from the Customs House and from the Assembly Rooms that, while modest, boast three glass chandeliers and a fine bay window overlooking the shore. Houses spread out from the center, along the coast and up the river, and shops and the Shambles market stalls march up Broad Street. It is not planned, like Bath or Cheltenham or Brighton, but wriggles this way and that, as if trying to escape the hills and sea, and failing.

But that is not all there is to Lyme. It is as if there are two villages side by side, connected by a small sandy beach, where the bathing machines are lined up, awaiting an influx of visitors. The other Lyme, at the west end of the beach, doesn’t shun, but embraces the sea. It is dominated by the Cobb, a long gray stone wall that curves like a finger out into the water and shelters the shore, creating a tranquil harbor for the fishing boats and the trading ships that come from all over. The Cobb is several feet high, and wide enough for three to walk along arm in arm, which many visitors do, for it gives a fine view back to the town and the dramatic shoreline beyond of rolling hills and cliffs in green, gray, and brown.

Bath and Brighton are beautiful despite their surroundings, the even buildings with their smooth stone creating an artifice that pleases the eye. Lyme is beautiful because of its surroundings, and despite its indifferent houses. It appealed to me immediately.

My sisters were also pleased with Lyme, for different reasons. For Margaret it was simple: She was the belle of Lyme’s balls. At eighteen she was fresh and lively, and as pretty as a Philpot was ever going to be. She had lovely ringlets of dark hair and long arms she liked to hold aloft so that people could admire their graceful lines. If her face was a little long, her mouth a little thin, and the tendons in her neck a little prominent, that did not matter when she was eighteen. It would matter later. At least she didn’t have my hatchet jaw or Louise’s unfortunate height. There were few to match her in Lyme that summer, and the gentlemen gave her more attention than at Weymouth or Brighton, where she had more competitors. Margaret was happy to live from ball to ball, filling the days in between with cards and tea at the Assembly Rooms, bathing in the sea, and strolling up and down the Cobb with the new friends she had made.

Louise did not care about balls and cards, but early on she discovered an area near the cliffs to the west of town with surprising flora and wild, secluded paths shaped by fallen rock and covered with ivy and moss. This pleased both her botanical interest and her retiring nature.

As for myself, I found my Lyme pursuit on a walk one morning along Monmouth Beach, to the west of the Cobb. We had joined our Weymouth friends the Durhams to search out a peculiar stone ledge along the beach called the Snakes’ Graveyard, which was only uncovered at low tide. It was farther than we’d thought, and the stony beach was difficult to walk on in thin pumps. I had to keep my eyes cast down so as not to trip on the rocks. As I stepped between two stones, I noticed an odd pebble decorated with a striped pattern. I bent over and picked it up—the first of thousands of times I would do so in my life. It was spiral-shaped, with ridges at even intervals around the spine, and it looked like a snake curled in on itself, the tip of the tail in the center. Its regular pattern was so pleasing to the eye that I felt I must keep it, though I had no idea what it was. I only knew that it could not be a pebble.

I showed it to Louise and Margaret, and then to the Weymouth family. “Ah, that is a snakestone,” Mr. Durham declared.

I almost dropped it, despite logic telling me the snake could not be alive. It could not be just a stone, though. Then I realized. “It is a—fossil, isn’t it?” I used the word hesitantly, for I wasn’t sure the Weymouth family would be familiar with it. Of course I had read about fossils, and seen some displayed in a cabinet at the British Museum, but I didn’t know they could be found so easily on the beach.

“I expect so,” Mr. Durham said. “People often find such things here. Some of the locals sell them as curiosities. They call them curies.”

“Where is its head?” Margaret asked. “It looks as if it’s been chopped off.”

“Perhaps it has fallen off,” Miss Durham suggested. “Where did you find the snakestone, Miss Philpot?”

I pointed out the spot, and we all looked but couldn’t see the head of a snake lying about. Soon the others lost interest and walked on. I searched a little longer, then followed the party, opening my hand now and then to gaze at this, my first specimen of what I would learn to call an ammonite. It was odd to be holding the body of a creature, whatever it was, and yet it pleased me too. Gripping its solid form was a comfort, like holding on to a walking stick or a staircase banister.

At the end of Monmouth Beach, just before Seven Rocks Point, where the shoreline turned out of sight, we found the Snakes’ Graveyard. It was a smooth ledge of limestone in which there were spiral impressions, white lines against the gray stone, of hundreds of creatures like that which I held, except that they were enormous, each the size of a dinner plate. It was such a strange, bleak sight that we all stared in silence.

“Those must be boa constrictors, don’t you think?” Margaret said. “They’re enormous!”

“But boa constrictors don’t live in England,” Miss Durham said. “How did they get here?”

“Perhaps they did live here, a few hundred years ago,” Mrs. Durham suggested.

“Or even a thousand years ago, or five thousand,” Mr. Durham ventured. “They could be that old. Perhaps the boa constrictors then migrated to other parts.”

They did not look like snakes to me, or any other animal I knew of. I walked out onto the ledge, stepping with care so as not to tread on the creatures, even if they were clearly long dead and not so much corporeal bodies but sketches in the rock. It was difficult to imagine them as alive once. They looked permanent, as if they’d always been in the stone.

If we lived here, I could come and see this whenever I liked, I thought. And find smaller snakestones, and other fossils as well, on the beach. It was something. It was enough, for me.

 

 

 

OUR BROTHER WAS DELIGHTED with our choice. Apart from Lyme being economical, William Pitt the Younger had stayed in the town as a youth to recover his health; John found it comforting that a British Prime Minister would think highly of the place he was banishing his sisters to. We moved to Lyme the following spring, with John securing for us a cottage high above the shops and beach, at the top of Silver Street, which is what Broad Street becomes farther up the hill leading out of town. Soon after, John and his new wife sold our Red Lion Square home and, with the help of her family’s money, bought a newly built house on nearby Montague Street, next to the British Museum. We had not meant our choice to cut us off from our past, but it did. We had only the present and the future to think of in Lyme.

Morley Cottage was a shock at first, with its small rooms, low ceilings, and uneven floors, so different from the London house we had grown up in. It was made of stone, with a slate roof, and had a parlor, dining room, and kitchen on the ground floor, with two bedrooms above as well as a room in the eaves for our servant, Bessy. Louise and I shared one room, giving Margaret the other, for she complained when we stayed up late reading—Louise her botany books, I my works on natural history. There was not enough room in the cottage to fit our mother’s piano or sofa or mahogany dining table. We had to leave them behind in London and buy smaller, plainer furniture in nearby Axminster, and a tiny piano in Exeter. The physical reduction of space and furnishings mirrored our own contraction, from a substantial family with several servants and plenty of visitors, to a reduced household with one servant to cook and clean, in a town with many fewer families with whom we could socialize.

We soon grew used to our new home, however. Indeed, after a time our old London house seemed too big. Its high ceilings and huge windows had made it hard to heat, and its dimensions had been larger than a person truly required, the grandeur false if you were not grand yourself. Morley Cottage was a lady’s home, the size of a lady’s character and expectations. Of course, we never had a man live there and so it is easy to think that way, but I believe a man of our position in society would have been uncomfortable. John was whenever he visited; he was always bumping his head on the beams, tripping over uneven doorsills, ducking his head to look out of the low windows, wavering on the steep stairs. Only the hearth in the kitchen was bigger than the grates in Bloomsbury.