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.