When the coach appeared, my stomach flip-flopped like a fish in the bottom of a boat. It seemed to take a year to drive up the long hill through the village. When at last it stopped and the door opened, I closed my eyes and tried to calm my heart, which had joined my stomach-two fish now flopping.
Then Margaret Philpot stepped down, and then Miss Louise, and finally Miss Elizabeth. I had not expected the Philpots. Normally Miss Elizabeth wrote to tell me which coach they would be on, but I’d had no letter. I did wonder if Colonel Birch might come out as well, but I knew Miss Elizabeth would never ride in the same coach as him.
I was never so disappointed as at that moment.
But they were my friends, and I went up to greet them. “Oh, Mary,” Miss Margaret cried, hanging on my neck, “what news we have for you! It is so overwhelming I almost can’t speak!” She clutched a handkerchief to her mouth.
Laughing, I freed myself from her embrace. “I know, Miss Margaret. I know about the auction. Colonel Birch wrote to Joe. And we saw the newspaper account.”
Miss Margaret’s face fell, and I felt a little bad to have robbed her of the pleasure of giving me such dramatic good news. But she soon recovered. “Oh, Mary,” she said, “how your fortunes have changed. I am so glad for you!”
Miss Louise too beamed at me, but Miss Elizabeth merely said, “It is good to see you, Mary,” and pecked at the air near my cheek. As usual she smelled of rosemary, even after two days in a coach.
When the Philpots and their things had been transferred to a cart to go on to Lyme, Miss Margaret called out, “Won’t you come with us, Mary?”
“Can’t.” I gestured towards the beach. “I’ve curies to pick up.”
“Come and see us tomorrow, then!” With a wave they left me alone at Charmouth. It was then the disappointment that Colonel Birch had not been on the coach struck me, and I went back upon beach feeling low and not at all like a girl whose family was coming into four hundred pounds. “He’ll be on the next one,” I said aloud to comfort myself. “He’ll come and I’ll have him to myself.”
Normally when the Philpots suggested I visit them, I went straightaway. I always liked Morley Cottage, for it was warm and clean and full of food and the good smells from Bessy’s baking-even if she liked to scowl at me. There were views of Golden Cap and the coast to lift the heart, and Miss Elizabeth’s fish to look at. Miss Margaret played the piano to entertain us and Miss Louise gave me flowers to bring home. Best of all, Miss Elizabeth and I talked about fossils, and looked over books and articles together.
Now, though, I didn’t want to see Miss Elizabeth. She had kept an eye on me for most of my life, and had become my friend even when others wouldn’t, but when she stepped off the coach in Charmouth I sensed disapproval from her rather than any happiness at seeing me again. Maybe she was not thinking of me, though. Maybe she was ashamed of herself. And she should be-her judgement of Colonel Birch had been completely wrong, and she must feel bad about it, though she wouldn’t say so. I could afford to be generous and ignore her foul mood, for I loved a man who would pull me from my poverty and make me happy, while she had no one. But I would not seek her out to sour my happiness.
I found reasons why I couldn’t go up Silver Street. I needed to hunt curies to make up for the months when I hadn’t. Or I insisted on cleaning the house to prepare for Colonel Birch coming to see us. Or I went out to Pinhay Bay to find him a pentacrinite since he had sold all of his. Then I went to meet each coach from London, though three came and went without him stepping off.
I was on my way back from the third coach, cutting through St Michael’s from the cliff path, when I met Miss Elizabeth coming the other way. Both of us jumped a little, startled, like we wished we’d seen the other first and had held back so we wouldn’t have to stop and greet each other.
Miss Elizabeth asked if I had been upon beach, and I had to admit I’d gone to Charmouth without hunting. She knew it were the day the coach arrived-I could see it in her face, working out why I had been there, and trying to hide her displeasure. She changed the subject, and we talked a little of Lyme and its doings while she had been gone. It was awkward, though, not the way we usually were with each other, and after a time we fell silent. I felt stiff, as if I’d sat too long on a leg and it had gone to sleep. It made me stand funny. Miss Elizabeth too held her head at an angle, like her neck still had a crick in it from all that riding in the London coach.
I was about to make an excuse and set off for Cockmoile Square when Miss Elizabeth seemed to reach a decision. When she is going to say something important she sticks out her chin and tightens her jaw. “I want to tell you about what happened in London, Mary. You are not to tell anyone I told you. Not your mother or brother, nor particularly my sisters, for they do not know what I witnessed.” Then she told me all about the auction, describing in detail what was sold and who was there and what they bought, how even the Frenchman Cuvier wanted a specimen for Paris. She said how Colonel Birch made his announcement about me at the end, naming me as the hunter. All the time she was talking I felt I were listening to a lecture about someone else, a Mary Anning who lived in another town, in another country, on the other side of the world, who collected something other than fossils-butterflies or old coins.
Miss Elizabeth frowned. “Are you listening, Mary?”
“I am, ma’am, but I’m not sure I’m hearing right.”
Miss Elizabeth gazed at me, her grey eyes pinched and serious. “Colonel Birch has named you in public, Mary. He has told some of the most interested fossil collectors in the country to seek you out. They will be coming here to ask you to take them out as you have done Colonel Birch. You must prepare yourself, and take care that you don’t…com-promise your character further.” She said the last with such a pursed mouth it were a marvel any words come out at all.
I fingered some lichen on the gravestone I stood next to. “I am not worried for my character, ma’am, nor what others think of me. I love Colonel Birch, and am waiting for him to come back.”
“Oh, Mary.” A whole set of emotions crossed Miss Elizabeth’s face-it was like watching playing cards being dealt one after the other-but mostly there was anger and sadness. Those two combined make jealousy, and it come over me then that Elizabeth Philpot was jealous of the attention Colonel Birch paid me. She shouldn’t be. She never had to sell or burn her furniture to keep a roof over her head and stay warm. She had plenty of tables rather than just the one. She didn’t go out every day no matter the weather or her health and stay out for hours hunting curies till her head swam. She didn’t have chilblains on her hands and feet, and fingertips cut and torn and grey with embedded clay. She didn’t have neighbours talking about her behind her back. She should pity me, and yet she envied me.
I shut my eyes for a moment, steadying myself with the gravestone. “Why can’t you be glad for me?” I said. “Why can’t you say, ‘I hope you will be very happy’?”
“I-” Miss Elizabeth gulped as if words were choking her. “I do hope that,” she finally managed to say, though it come out all strangled. “But I don’t want you to make a fool of yourself. I want you to think sensibly about what is possible for your life.”
I ripped the lichen off the stone. “You’re jealous of me.”
“I’m not!”
“Yes, you are. You’re jealous of Colonel Birch because he courted me. You loved him and he paid no attention to you.”
Miss Elizabeth looked stricken, like I’d hit her. “Stop, please.”
But it was as if a river had risen in me and broken its banks. “He never even looked at you. It was me he wanted! And why shouldn’t he? I’m young, and I’ve got the eye! All your education and your one hundred and fifty pounds a year and your elderflower champagne and your silly tonics, and your silly sisters with their turbans and roses. And your fish! Who cares about fish when there are monsters in the cliffs to be found? But you won’t find them because you haven’t got the eye. You’re a dried up old spinster who will never get a man or a monster. And I will.” It felt so good and so horrible to say these things aloud that I thought I might be sick.