Remarkable Creatures (8 page)

“Take him a minute.” I handed baby to Joe and went to look at Mam in the next room. She was flat out asleep, looking so peaceful for a change that I hadn’t the heart to lay screaming baby next to her. So we took him with us, wrapped in as many shawls as would stay on the little thing.

As we picked our way along the beach—slower than usual, for I was clutching baby and couldn’t use my hands for balance over the stones—Joe described how he was looking for curies in the new rubble that had come down during the storms. He told me he weren’t searching the cliffs themselves, but when he stood up after scrabbling round in the loose rocks, a row of teeth embedded in a seam of the cliff face caught his eye.

“Here.” Joe stopped where he’d left four stones piled up, three as a base and one on top, the marker we Annings used to keep track of our finds if we had to leave them. I set down baby, who was barely whimpering by now, he were that cold, and stared hard at the layers of rock where Joe pointed. I didn’t feel the cold at all, I was so excited.

Straightaway I saw the teeth, just below eye level. They weren’t in even rows, but all a jumble between two long dark pieces that must have been the creature’s mouth and jaw. These bones met together in a tip, making a long pointy snout. I ran my finger over it all. It give me a lightning jolt to see that snout. Here was the monster Pa had been looking for all these years, but now would never see.

There was a bigger surge of lightning to come, though. Joe put his finger on a large bump above where the jaw was hinged. Rock covered some of it, but it looked to be circular, like a bread roll sitting on a saucer. From the curve you might think it were part of an ammonite, but there were no spiral with spines going round. Instead there were plates of bone overlaid round a big empty socket. I stared at that socket and got the feeling it was staring back.

“Is that its eye?” I asked.

“Think so.”

I shuddered, one of them shivers that come over you when you’re not even cold but you can’t stop yourself. I didn’t know crocodile eyes could be so big. In the picture Miss Elizabeth showed me the croc had little piggy eyes, not huge owly ones. It made me feel odd looking at that eye, like there was a world of curiosities I didn’t know about: crocodiles with huge eyes and snakes with no heads and thunderbolts God threw down that turned to stone. Sometimes I got that hollowed-out feeling too when looking at a sky full of stars or into the deep water the few times I went out in a boat, and I didn’t like it: It was as if the world were too strange for me ever to understand it. Then I would have to go and sit in chapel until I felt I could let God take care of all the mysteries and the worry went away.

“How long is it?” I said, trying to make sense of the monster by asking questions.

“Dunno—three or four feet, just the skull.” Joe ran his hand over the rock to the right of the jaw and eye. “Don’t see the body.”

Bits of loose shale tumbled down the cliff and fell near us. We looked up and stepped back, but nothing further come down.

I glanced at baby, wrapped up in his cocoon so he looked like a caterpillar. He’d stopped whimpering and was squinting into the gray sky. I couldn’t tell if he were following the clouds that scudded across.

Far down the beach, at Charmouth, two men were pulling a rowboat down to the shore, out to check lobster pots. Joe and I quick stepped back from the cliff, like children caught eyeing a plate of cakes. The men were too far away to see where we were or what we were doing, but we were still cautious. Though few hunted the way we did, people were sure to be interested in such a thing as the croc. And now I could see it, it was so obvious in the cliff, with its forest of teeth and saucer eye, that I was sure someone else would soon spot it.

“We got to dig out the croc,” I said.

“We never dug anything this big,” Joe said. “Could we even lift four feet of rock?”

He was right. I had used my hammer to get ammos out of rocks on the beach, and out of the cliff, but most of the time we let the wind and the rain wear away the cliff and release the curies for us.

“We need help,” I said, though I did not like to admit it. We had already had so much help from the village since Pa’s death, and it were hard to ask for more without paying, especially when it was to do with curies. Fanny Miller weren’t the only one who hated fossils. “Let’s ask Miss Elizabeth what to do.”

Joe frowned. Like Mam and Pa, he had always been suspicious of Elizabeth Philpot. He couldn’t understand what a lady like her would want with curies, nor why she was willing to have anything to do with me. Joe didn’t get the same feeling when he found a cury as Miss Elizabeth and I did, like we were discovering a new world. Even now, with something as amazing as the crocodile, he was quick losing his excitement and only seeing the problems. I wanted to go to Miss Elizabeth not only because she could help us, but because she would be as thrilled as I was.

We stayed a long time, chipping at the croc with my hammer and talking about what to do. We spent so long there that the tide cut us off and we had to climb over the cliffs back to Lyme—not easy with baby in my arms. Poor mite. He died the following summer. I always wondered if it weakened him, being taken upon beach in the cold. Of course, so many of Mam’s babies died that it were no surprise he didn’t last. But I could have stayed inside with him and gone the next day to see the croc. That’s how fossil hunting is: It takes over, like a hunger, and nothing else matters but what you find. And even when you find it, you still start looking again the next minute, because there might be something even better waiting.

I hadn’t ever seen anything better than what Joe found that day, though. That brought the lightning straight through me, as if waking me from a long sleep. I was glad to see it. I just wished I had discovered it rather than Joe. It was a surprise to everyone that Joe found such an unusual specimen, for it weren’t in his nature to look out for something new. That was what I was good at. I tried not to be jealous, but it was hard. Soon enough, people forgot it was Joe who found the croc and made it my croc. I didn’t stop them, and Joe didn’t seem to mind. He was happy to step back from it and just be plain Joe Anning rather than a hunter who could find a monster. It was hard for him, being part of a family so talked about and judged. If he could have stopped being an Anning, I think he would have. Since he couldn’t, he kept his thoughts to himself.

 

 

 

NEXT MORNING WE TOOK Miss Elizabeth to see the skull. It were one of those clear, cold days that makes all the rocks look crisp, though it didn’t last long, the winter sun just skimming the horizon past Lyme Bay. Despite the cold, Miss Elizabeth needed no convincing, but come out straightaway, though their servant Bessy muttered and Miss Margaret twittered that they had guests coming soon. Now I was getting older I’d begun to find Miss Margaret a little silly, preferring the quietness of Miss Louise or the tartness of Miss Elizabeth. Miss Elizabeth didn’t care about guests, but wanted to see the monster.

When we reached the end of Church Cliffs, I almost gasped at how clear its peculiar outline was in the cliff face. Miss Elizabeth was silent. She took off her nice gloves and put on the work gloves with the tips cut off so that she could run her fingers along its long, pointy snout and its great jumble of teeth. At the end where the jaws were hinged, she prized off a flake of stone. “Look,” she said, “there is a slight upturn of its mouth where it seems to be smiling. Do you recall that in the drawing I showed you of the crocodile in Cuvier’s book?”

“Yes, ma’am. But look at its eye!” I used my hammer to tap carefully and reveal more of the ring of bones that overlapped like giant fish scales round an empty center where the eyeball must have been once.

Miss Elizabeth stared. “Are you sure that is the eye?” She seemed disturbed by it.

“Don’t know what else it could be,” Joe said.

“That is not how the eye looked in Cuvier’s drawing.”

“Maybe this one had a problem with its eye,” I suggested. “Like a disease. Or maybe the Frenchman drew it wrong.”

Miss Elizabeth snorted. “Only a girl like you would dare question the work of the world’s finest zoological anatomist.”

I frowned. I didn’t like this Cuvier.

Thankfully Miss Elizabeth didn’t dwell on my stupidity nor on the croc’s eye. She was more concerned with practical matters. “How are you going to get this out of the cliff? It must be four feet long at least.”

“It’ll take digging like we’ve never done before, won’t it, Joe?”

Joe shrugged.

“But four feet of rock—won’t that be too heavy for you? What you need are men to help you. Strong men.” Miss Elizabeth thought for a moment. “What about the men building the walkway along the beach to the Cobb? They know how to cut rock, and they’re strong. Perhaps they could do it for you.”

“Perhaps they could, ma’am,” I said, “but we haven’t the money to pay ’em.”

“I will advance you the money, and you can pay me back when you have sold the specimen.”

I brightened. “Oh, could you, Miss Elizabeth? We would be so grateful, wouldn’t we, Joe?”

But Joe weren’t listening. “Mary, Miss Philpot, step away from it!” he hissed. “It’s Captain Cury!”

I looked back. Clambering round the bend that hid Lyme from us was the only other fossil hunter who might consider trying to get at our croc. While most respected other’s finds, Captain Cury didn’t care who had spotted something first. Once he took a giant ammonite Joe and me had begun digging out from a cliff on Monmouth Beach and laughed in our faces when we told him it was ours. “Shouldn’t have left it, then, should you? It were me finished the digging, so it’s me as gets it,” he’d said. Even when Pa went to talk to him about it, he swore he’d already seen it and marked it out, and that it were Joe and me that was wrong to do the digging when it was his.

Captain Cury mustn’t see the croc. If he did, we would have to guard it all the time. I stepped back from the skull, picked up a likely nodule, and moved down towards the water’s edge where there was a flat stone good for hammering on. Joe headed in the Charmouth direction, then stopped fifty feet away to scrabble amongst small chunks of fool’s gold, looking for a pyritized ammo. Golden serpents, we called them. Miss Philpot took several steps and begun studying the ground, then knelt to pick up a stone. From under my bonnet rim I watched as Captain Cury approached the croc in the cliff face, his spade over one shoulder. Now that I had exposed its eye more clearly, the skull seemed to be staring and grinning to attract attention. Captain Cury’s eyes skimmed the cliff, and he paused right where we had been standing. Joe’s feet on the stones went quiet, and I stopped hammering.

Captain Cury bent over and picked up something. When he straightened, his face was just inches from the monster’s eye. My heart begun to pound. Then he held out a glove. “Miss Philpot, is this yours? It’s too fine for Mary.”

“I expect it is mine, Mr. Lock,” Miss Elizabeth answered. She never called him Captain Cury but used his real name, the way she called Joe Joseph, and ammos ammonites and not snakestones, and bellies belemnites rather than thunderbolts. She was formal like that. “Bring it here, please.”

He went over and handed it to her. I could breathe again, now he were away from the croc. “Found anything?” he asked when she’d thanked him.

“Just a gryphaea. Devil’s toenail to you.”

“Let’s see it.” Captain Cury squatted next to her. Fossil hunting does that to people—it breaks down the rules. On the beach a hostler can speak to a lady in a way he wouldn’t dream of doing anywhere else.

I hurried over to rescue her. “What are you doing here, Captain Cury?” I demanded.

He chuckled. “Same as you, Mary—looking out for curies to bring in a few pennies. Mind you, you need ’em more’n I do now, don’t you, the way your father left you fixed. Here.” He tossed something to me. It was a golden serpent.

“This is what I think of your curies, Captain Cury.” I turned and threw it as hard as I could. Though the tide was out, I got it to land in the water.

“Hey, now!” Captain Cury glared at me. No one likes to have their curies wasted like that. It’s like throwing coins in the sea. “What a nasty girl you become,” he said. “Must’ve been that lightning shook you up and made you that way. You should’ve carried a thunderbolt to keep from getting hit. Instead you’re so mean you’ll grow up into a sour old spinster no man will look at.”

I opened my mouth to respond, but Miss Elizabeth got there before me. “It’s time you moved on, Mr. Lock,” she said.

Captain Cury’s glittery eyes shifted from me to her. “Next time I won’t bother to pick up your glove, ma’am,” he sneered. By now Joe had come back, so he said no more, but swung his spade onto his shoulder and carried on down the beach towards Charmouth, glancing back now and then.

“Mary, you were very rude to him,” Miss Elizabeth said. “I’m ashamed of you.”

“He was ruder to me! And to you!”

“Nevertheless, you should show respect to your elders, else they will think the worse of you.”

“Sorry, Miss Philpot.” I didn’t feel at all sorry.

“You two stay here until the tide comes in,” Miss Elizabeth commanded, “in sight of the creature, to make sure William Lock doesn’t come back and discover it. I will go to the Cobb to see about engaging the men to dig out the crocodile tomorrow—if it is a crocodile. Though what else could it be?”

I shrugged. Her question made me uneasy, though I couldn’t say why.

“It be one of God’s creatures, of course,” Joe said.

“Sometimes I wonder . . .”

“Wonder what, ma’am?” I asked.

Miss Elizabeth looked at me and Joe and seemed to come to her senses, like she just realized it was us she was with. She shook her head. “Nothing. It is just an odd-looking crocodile.” She glanced at the skull once more before she left.