Читать книгу Remarkable Creatures - Tracy Chevalier - Страница 8

I don’t remember there ever being a time when I weren’t out upon beach. Mam used to say the window was open when I was born, and the first thing I saw when they held me up was the sea. Our house in Cockmoile Square backed onto it next to Gun Cliff, so as soon as I could walk I’d be out there upon the rocks, with my brother Joe but a few years older to look after me and keep me from drowning. Depending on the time of year, there’d be plenty of others about, walking to the Cobb, looking at the boats, or going out in the bathing machines, which looked like privies on wheels to me. Some even went in the water in November. Joe and me laughed at them, for the swimmers would come out wet and cold and miserable, like dunked cats, but pretending it was good for them.

I had my share of tussles with the sea over the years. Even I, with the tide times as natural in me as the beat of my heart, got caught out from looking for curies and cut off by the sea creeping up, and had to wade through it or climb over the cliffs to get home. I never bathed deliberately, though, not like the London ladies coming to Lyme for their health. I always been one for solid ground, rocks rather than water. I thank the sea for giving me fish to eat, and for releasing fossils from the cliffs, or washing them out of the sea bed. Without the sea the bones stay locked up in their rock tombs forever, and we’d have no money for food and lodging.

I was always looking for curies, for as long as I can recall. Pa took me out and showed me where to look, said what they were – verteberries, Devil’s toenails, St Hilda’s snakes, bezoars, thunderbolts, sea lilies. Before long I could hunt on my own. Even when you go out with someone hunting, you’re not beside them every step. You can’t be inside their eyes, you have to use your own, look your own way. Two people can look over the same rocks and see different things. One will see a lump of chert, the other a sea urchin. When I was a girl I’d be out with Pa and he’d find verteberries in the spot I’d already turned over. “Look,” he’d say, and reach over to pick one up that was right at my feet. Then he would laugh at me and cry, “You’ll have to look harder than that, girl!” It never bothered me, for he was my father and he was meant to find more than me, and teach me what to do. I wouldn’t have wanted to be better than him.

To me, looking for curies is like looking for a four-leaf clover: it’s not how hard you look, but how something will appear different. My eyes will brush over a patch of clover, and I’ll see 3, 3, 3, 3, 4, 3, 3. The four leaves just pop out at me. Same with curies: I’ll wander here and there along the beach, letting my eyes drift over stones without thinking, and out will jump the straight lines of a bellie, or the stripy marks and curve of an ammo, or the grain of bone against the smooth flint. Its pattern stands out when everything else is a jumble.

Everyone hunts differently. Miss Elizabeth studies the cliff face and the ledges and the loose stones so hard you think her head will burst. She does find things, but it takes her much more effort. She don’t have the eye like me.

When he hunted, my brother Joe had a different method again, and hated my way. He is three years older than me, but when we were young it felt sometimes like he was years and years older. He was like a little grown up, slow and serious and careful. It was our job to find curies and bring them back to Pa, though sometimes we set about cleaning them too, if Pa were busy with his cabinets. Joe never liked to be outside when it were blowy. He found curies, though. He was good at it even if he didn’t want to do it. He had the eye. His way was to take a patch of beach, divide it into squares, and search each square equally, going back and forth at an even pace, slow and steady. He found more than me, but I found the unusual bits, the crocodile ribs and teeth, the bezoar stones and sea urchins, the things you didn’t expect.

Pa hunted by using a long pole to poke amongst the rocks so he wouldn’t have to bend over. He learned this from Mr Crookshanks, the friend who first taught Pa about curies. He jumped off Gun Cliff behind our house when I was only three. Pa said he’d had too much debt and even curies couldn’t keep him from the workhouse. Not that Pa learned from Mr Crookshanks’ mistake. Pa was always looking to find what he called the monster that would pay all our debts. Over the years we’d found teeth and verteberries and what looked like ribs, as well as funny little cubes like kernels of corn, and other bones we couldn’t make out but thought must come from a big animal like a crocodile. Miss Elizabeth showed one to me once when I was cleaning curies for her. She had a book full of drawings of all sorts of animals and their skeletons, by a Frenchman called Cuvier.

Pa didn’t hunt as much as we did, for he had his cabinet making, though he’d come out when he could. He preferred curies to woodwork, which upset Mam, for the money was unpredictable, and hunting took him away from Cockmoile Square and the family. She probably suspected he preferred being alone upon beach to a house full of squally babies – for she did have some squallers. All of them cried but Joe and me. Mam never come upon beach, except to shout at Pa if he went hunting on a Sunday and shamed her at Chapel. Though it didn’t stop him, he agreed not to take Joe and me out on Sundays.

Other than us there were but one other who sold curies: an ancient hostler called William Lock, who worked at the Queen’s Arms at Charmouth, where coaches between London and Exeter changed horses. William Lock found he could sell fossils to the travellers as they stretched their legs and looked about. As fossils were known as curiosities, or curies, he come to be called Captain Cury. Though he’d been finding and selling fossils for years – longer even than Pa had – he didn’t carry a hammer, but picked up whatever was lying easily to hand, or dug things up with the spade he kept with him. He was a mean old man who looked at me funny. I stayed away from him.

We would see Captain Cury from time to time upon beach, but until Miss Elizabeth come to Lyme, the shore were deserted of other cury hunters apart from us. Mostly I went looking with Joe or with Pa. Sometimes, though, I went down upon beach with Fanny Miller. She was the same age as me and lived just up the river from Lyme, past the cloth factory, in what we called Jericho. Her father was a wood cutter who sold wood to Pa, her mam worked at the factory, and the Millers were members of the Congregationalist Chapel in Coombe Street like us. Lyme was full of Dissenters, though it had a proper church too, St Michael’s, that was always trying to lure us back. We Annings wouldn’t go, though – we were proud to think differently from the traditional Church of England, even if I couldn’t really say what those differences were.

Fanny was a pretty thing, small and fair-haired and delicate, with blue eyes I envied. We used to play finger games during Sunday services when it got dull, and would run up and down the river chasing sticks and leaves we’d made into boats, or picking watercress. Though Fanny always preferred the river, sometimes she would go with me upon beach between Lyme and Charmouth, though she would never go as far as Black Ven, for she thought the cliff there looked evil and stones would tumble down on her head. We would build villages from pebbles, or fill in the holes tiny clams called piddocks made in the rock ledges. At the same time I would keep an eye out for curies, so it was never just play for me.

Fanny had the eye but hated to use it. She loved pretty things: chunks of milky quartz, striped pebbles, knobs of fool’s gold. Her jewels, she called them. She would find these treasures, yet wouldn’t touch good ammos and bellies even when she knew I wanted them. They scared her. “I don’t like them,” she would say with a shiver, but could never explain why, other than to say “They’re ugly,” if I pressed her, or “Mam says they’re from the fairies.” She said a sea urchin was a fairy loaf, which was their bread, and if you kept it on a shelf your milk wouldn’t go sour. I told her what Pa taught me: that ammos were snakes that had lost their heads, that bellies were thunderbolts God had thrown down, that gryphies were the Devil’s own toenails. That scared her even more. I knew they were just stories. If the Devil really shed that many toenails, he would have to have had thousands of feet. And if lightning was to create that many bellies, it would be striking all day long. But Fanny couldn’t think like that, and would hold on to her fear. I’ve met plenty of others the same – frightened of what they don’t understand.

But I loved Fanny, she being my one true friend then. Our family weren’t popular in Lyme, for people thought Pa’s interest in fossils odd. Even Mam did, though she would defend him if she heard talk about him at the Shambles or outside Chapel.

Fanny did not remain my friend, though, no matter how many jewels I brought back for her from the beach. It weren’t just that the Millers were suspicious of fossils; they were suspicious of me too, especially once I started helping the Philpots, who people in town made fun of as the London ladies too peculiar even to get a Lyme man. Fanny would never come if I was going upon beach with Miss Elizabeth. She got more and more funny with me, making comments about Miss Elizabeth’s bony face and Miss Margaret’s silly turbans, and pointing out holes in my boots and clay under my nails. I begun to wonder if she were my friend after all.

Then when we did go along the shore one day, Fanny were so sullen that I let us get cut off by the tide, as a punishment for her mood. When she saw the last strip of sand next to the cliff disappear under a foamy wave, Fanny begun to cry. “What we going to do?” she kept sobbing.

I watched, with no desire to comfort her. “We can wade through the water or climb up to the cliff path,” I said. “You choose.” Myself, I did not want to wade a quarter of a mile along the cliff to the point where the town begun on higher ground. The water was freezing and the sea rough, and I could not swim, but I did not tell her that.

Fanny gazed equally fearfully at the churning sea and the steep climb we faced. “I cannot choose,” she squealed. “I cannot!”

I let her cry a little more, then led her up the rough path, pulling and pushing her to the top where the cliff path goes between Charmouth and Lyme. Once she’d recovered, Fanny would not look at me, and when we neared the town she run off, and I did not try to catch her up. I had never been cruel to anyone, and did not like myself for it. But it was the start of the feeling I had ever after that I did not entirely belong to the people I ought to in Lyme. Whenever I run into Fanny Miller – at Chapel, on Broad Street, along the river – her big blue eyes turned hard like ice covering a puddle, and she talked about me behind her hand with her new friends. I felt even more like an outsider.

Our troubles truly begun when I was eleven and we lost Pa. Some say it were his own fault for taking a bad tumble one night coming back to Lyme along the cliff path. He swore he’d had no drink, but of course we could all smell it. He was lucky he weren’t killed going over, but he was laid up for months. He couldn’t make cabinets, and the curies Joe and I found only brought in a bit, so the debt he had already got us into become much worse. Mam said the fall weakened him so that he couldn’t fight the illness when it come a few months later.

I was sad to lose him, but I had no time to dwell on it, for he left us with such debts and not a shilling in our pockets: me and Joe and Mam, and her carrying a baby born a month after we buried Pa. Joe and I had to hold her up and almost carry her into the Coombe Street Chapel for the funeral. Between us we got her there, but we were a sight, staggering in with Mam to a funeral we couldn’t even pay for. They had to take up a collection in the town, and most showed up, to see what it was they had bought.

Afterwards we put Mam to bed and I went out upon beach, as I did most days, funeral or no, though I did wait till Mam were asleep. It would upset her if she knew where I was going. To her, Pa’s falling off the cliff when he should have been in his workshop were just proof from God that we shouldn’t have spent so much time on curies.

I walked towards Charmouth, an eye on the tide, which was coming in now but slow enough that I wouldn’t get caught out yet. I got past Church Cliffs and the narrow bit where the beach curves round and then widens out, with Black Ven hanging above, grey and brown and green stripes of rock and grass like the coat of a tabby cat, slipping down gradual rather than like the sheer face of Church Cliffs. Mud from the Blue Lias oozes onto the beach there and deposits treasures for those willing to dig through it.

I searched the clay, just as I had for so many years with Pa. It were a comfort, hunting by the cliffs. I could forget he was gone, and think that if I just looked round he’d be behind me, bent over stones or poking at a seam of rock in the cliff with his stick, working in his own world while I worked in mine. Of course he weren’t there that day, nor any day after, no matter how many times I looked up to catch sight of him.

I found nothing in the Blue Lias but shards of bellies, which I kept even though they were worthless with the tip broke off. Visitors only want to buy long bellies, preferably with the tip intact. But once I’ve picked something up it’s hard to drop it again.

In the rocks, though, I discovered a complete unbroken ammonite. It fitted perfectly in my palm, and I closed my fingers over it and squeezed it. I wanted to show it to someone; you always do want to show your finds, to make them real. But Pa – who would have known how hard it was to find such a perfect ammo – Pa weren’t there. I shut my eyes to stop the tears. I wanted to keep that ammo in my hand always, squeezing it and thinking of Pa.

“Hello, Mary.” Elizabeth Philpot was standing over me, dark against the grey light of the sky. “I didn’t expect to find you out here today.”

I couldn’t see her expression, and wondered what she thought of me being upon beach rather than at home, comforting Mam.

“What have you found?”

I scrambled to my feet and held out the ammo. Miss Elizabeth took it. “Ah, a lovely one. Liparoceras, is it?” Miss Elizabeth liked to use what she called the Linnaean names. Sometimes I thought she did it to show off. “The points on the ribs are all intact, aren’t they? Where did you find it?”

I gestured to the rocks at our feet.

“Don’t forget to write down where you found it, which layer of rock and the date. It is important to record it.” Since I’d learned to read and write at Chapel Sunday school, Miss Elizabeth was always nagging me to make labels. She glanced down the beach. “Will the tide cut us off, do you think?”

“We’ve a few minutes, ma’am. I’ll turn back soon.”

Miss Elizabeth nodded, knowing that I would prefer to walk back on my own rather than with her. She took no offence – hunters often like to be alone. “Oh, Mary,” she said as she turned to go. “My sisters and I are all very sorry about your father. I will come by tomorrow. Bessy has made a pie, Louise a tonic for your mother, and Margaret has knitted a scarf.”

“That be kind,” I mumbled. I wanted to ask what use scarves and tonics were to us now, when we needed coal or bread or money. But the Philpots had always been good to me, and I knew better than to complain.

A gust blew the rim of Miss Elizabeth’s bonnet so that it turned inside out. She pushed it back and wrapped her shawl close, then frowned. “Where’s your coat, girl? It’s cold to be out without.”

I shrugged. “I’m not cold.” In fact, I was cold, though I hadn’t noticed till she said so. I’d forgot my coat, which was too small for me anyway, for it held my arms back when I need them to be free. I weren’t thinking about coats that day.

I waited until Miss Elizabeth had got to the curve in the deserted beach before I made my own way back, still squeezing the ammo. The line of her straight back far ahead kept me company and was a comfort of sorts. Only when I reached Lyme did I see anyone else. A group of Londoners in town for the last of the season were strolling by Gun Cliff at the back of our house. As I slipped past them, a lady called to me, “Find anything?”

Without thinking I opened my hand. She gasped and caught up the ammo to show the others, who stopped to admire it. “I’ll give you half a crown for it, girl.” The lady handed the ammo to one of the men and opened a purse. I wanted to say it weren’t for sale, that it was mine to help me remember Pa by, but she’d already put the coin in my hand and turned away. I stared at the money and thought, “Here is a week’s bread. It’ll keep us from the workhouse.” Pa would’ve wanted that.

I hurried home, squeezing that coin tight. It was proof that we could still make a business out of the curies.

Mam no longer complained about our hunting. She didn’t have time to: by the time she recovered from the shock of Pa’s death, the baby were born, which she called Richard after Pa. Like all the past babies, this one were a cryer. He was never very well, and nor was Mam; she was cold and tired, with baby not sleeping well and feeding badly. It were baby’s crying – that and the debt – that sent Joe out into the bitter cold he hated, one day a few months after Pa’s death. We needed fossils. I wanted to go out too, even with the cold, but I was stuck indoors, jiggling baby about to stop his crying. He was such a squally little thing it was hard to like him. The only thing that shut him up was when I held him tight and jiggled him and sang “Don’t Let Me Die an Old Maid” over and over.

I was just singing the last lines for the sixth time – “Come old or come young, come foolish or witty/ Don’t let me die an old maid, but take me for pity” – when Joe come in, banging the door back so I jumped. A bank of cold air hit me and started baby crying again. “Look what you done!” I shouted. “He was just quieting and you gone and woke him.”

Joe shut the door and turned back to me. That’s when I saw that he was excited. Usually nothing stirs my brother – he has a face like a rock, with little expression or change. Now, though, his brown eyes were lit like the sun shone through them, his cheeks were red, his mouth was open. He snatched his cap off and rumpled his hair so that it stood straight up.

“What is it, Joe?” I said. “Oh, hush, baby, hush!” I put baby over my shoulder. “What is it?”

“I found something.”

“What? Show me.” I looked to see what he was holding.

“You have to come out. It’s in the cliff. It’s big.”

“Where?”

“The end of Church Cliffs.”

“What is it?”

“Don’t know. Something – different. Long jaw, lots of teeth.” Joe looked almost scared.

“It’s a crocodile,” I declared. “It must be.”

“Come and see.”

“Can’t – what would I do with baby?”

“Bring him with.”

“Can’t do that – it’s too cold.”

“What about leaving him next door?”

I shook my head. “They done too much for us already – we can’t ask them again, not for something like this.” Our neighbours in Cockmoile Square were wary of curies. They envied us the little money we made from them, while also asking why anyone would want to part with even a penny for a bit of stone. I knew we had to ask for their help only when we really needed them.

“Take him a minute.” I handed the 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 grey 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 row boat 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 prised 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 centre 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 pyritised ammo. Golden serpents, we called them. Miss Philpot took several steps and begun studying the ground, then kneeled 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 realised 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.

Twin brothers, Davy and Billy Day, come the next afternoon to dig. It was a shame the tide was lowest in the early afternoon, for it was a busier time upon the beach than the early morning or evening. We would rather have done the digging when no one was about, at least until we knew what we had, and had it secure.

The Days were quarrymen who built roads and did repairs on the Cobb. They had block-like chests and massive arms and short stocky legs, and they walked with their chests thrust forward and their arses pinched. They didn’t say much, nor show any surprise when they come to the crocodile staring at them from the cliff face with its saucer eye. They treated it as the work it was, for all the world like they were cutting a block of stone to be used as paving, or for a wall, and didn’t have a monster locked in it.

They ran their hands over the stone round the skull, feeling for natural fissures they could hammer wedges into. I kept quiet, for they had more experience than me with cutting rock. I would learn much from them over the years, once my hunting begun to include cutting large specimens from the cliff face or stone ledges that were uncovered at low tide. The Days were to cut many monsters for me when I couldn’t do it myself.

They took their time, despite the short afternoon light and the tide creeping up and them only given half a day off for the work. Before each blow, they studied the rock surface. Once deciding on where to place the iron wedge, they then talked about the angle and force needed before at last using the hammer. At times, each tap was delicate and seemed to have no effect on the rock. Then Billy or Davy – I could never tell which was which – used all his might to strike the blow that brought out another chunk of cliff.

As they worked, a crowd gathered, both people who had been out upon beach already and children who seemed to know we were there almost before we arrived – including Fanny Miller, who would not look at me, but hung back with her friends. It’s impossible to keep secrets in Lyme – the place is too small and the need for amusement too great. Even a freezing winter day won’t stop people coming out to watch something new. The children ran along the shore, skimming stones and scrabbling about in the mud and sand. Some of the grown ups searched for fossils, though few knew what they were doing. Others stood and chatted, and a few men gave advice to Davy and Billy about how to cut the rock. Not everyone remained the four hours it took to get the skull out, for once the sun went behind the cliffs it got even colder. But quite a number did stay.

In the crowd was Captain Cury, come up the beach from Charmouth. When the Days finally managed to prise loose the skull, in three sections – two of the snout and eye, one with part of the head behind the eye socket – and laid it out on a stretcher made from cloth hung between two poles, Captain Cury stood over it with the others and examined the monster. He was paying special attention to the jumble of verteberries at the back of the skull. Their presence hinted at a body that must have been left behind in the cliff. It was too dark now to see back into the hole where the skull had been. We would have to come back when it was light again to look for the body.

I hated Captain Cury being so nosy but didn’t dare be rude again, for he frightened me. “Don’t like him here,” I whispered to Miss Elizabeth. “Don’t trust him. Can’t you get the Days to bring it home now, ma’am?”

Billy and Davy were sitting on a rock, passing a jug and a loaf of bread between them. They looked as if they would not budge, though it was twilight, and frost was already covering the rocks and sand. “They deserve their rest,” Miss Elizabeth said. “The tide will move them along soon enough.”

At last the brothers wiped their mouths and stood. Once they’d picked up the stretcher, Captain Cury vanished into the gloom towards Charmouth. We headed in the opposite direction, back to Lyme, following the Days as if they were carrying a coffin to its grave. Indeed, we took the path that led into town through St Michael’s graveyard, and then down Butter Market to Cockmoile Square. Along the way people stopped to peer at the slabs of stone on the stretcher, and there were murmurs of “crocodile” all along the street.

The day after we got the skull out, I run back to Church Cliffs as soon as the tide let me, but Captain Cury had already got there. He was willing to wade through water and freeze his feet so he would be first. I couldn’t challenge him, for I was on my own – Joseph had been hired to do a day’s work at Lyme’s mill, where one of the workers had taken ill, and couldn’t give up the chance to earn us a day’s bread. I hid and watched Captain Cury poking into the great hole the skull had left in the cliff. Cursing him, I hoped a rock would fall from above and hit his head.

Then I had a wicked, wicked idea, and I’m ashamed to say I followed it. I never told anyone how bad I was that day. I run back along the beach, then climbed the path above Church Cliffs, creeping along it to where I was just above the crocodile hole. “God damn you, Captain Cury,” I whispered, and pushed a loose rock the size of my fist over the edge. I heard him give a shout, and smiled as I lay flat on the ground to be sure he wouldn’t see me. Though I did not mean to hurt him, I did want to scare him off.

He would be standing away from the cliff now, watching to see what more would come down. I chose a larger rock and shoved it over, along with a handful of dirt and pebbles to make it seem like an avalanche. This time I heard nothing, but kept low. If he knew what I was doing he would punish me, I was sure.

Then it occurred to me he might come looking. Though it was common for rocks to fall, Captain Cury was the suspicious sort. I crept back from the cliff and hurried back down the path. Just in time I darted behind a clump of tall grass as he come past with a face full of fury. Somehow he’d worked out the stones weren’t naturally falling. I hid till he was out of sight, then nipped down the path to the beach and run along the cliff to the crocodile hole. With luck I could have a quick look before he come back, just to see if we would need to get the Day brothers digging again.

In the clear daylight it was easier to see back into the hole Billy and Davy had made. The skull had come out at an angle, and the body, depending how long it was, could extend far into the stone. With a head four foot long it could easily be ten to fifteen feet into the cliff. I crawled into the space and felt near the spot where I remembered the skull’s verteberries ended. I touched a long ridge of knobbly rock and begun to scrape at it to get the dirt and clay off.

Then Captain Cury rushed up behind me in a rage. “You! Not surprised to find you here, you nasty little bitch.”

I shrieked and jumped out of the hole, then flattened myself against the cliff, terrified to be caught alone with him. “Get away from me – it’s my croc!” I cried.

Captain Cury grabbed my arm and twisted it behind me. He were strong for an old man. “Trying to kill me, was you, girl? I’ll teach you a lesson!” He reached behind him for his spade.

I never found out what he would have taught me, for at that moment the cliff come to my aid. In the years since I’ve many times felt it my enemy. That day, though, the cliff sent down a shower of rocks near by, some of them as large as those I’d rolled over, accompanied by a slide of pebbles. Captain Cury, who’d been about to hurt me, suddenly become my saviour, jerking me away from the cliff as a rock smashed down where I’d just been standing. “Quick!” he cried, and we clung onto each other as we stumbled towards the water to a safe distance. Then we looked back to see that the whole section of cliff I’d been standing on top of not long before had crumbled, turning from solid ground into a river of stones raining down. The roar of it was like the thunder I’d heard as a baby, but it lasted longer and rushed through me like darkness rather than the bright buzz of lightning. It took at least a minute for the rocks and scree to finish falling to the bottom of the cliff. Captain Cury and I remained frozen, watching and waiting.

When at last the cliff stopped moving and it grew quiet, I begun to cry. It weren’t just that I’d almost died. The landslip was now completely blocking the hole where the crocodile’s body was. We couldn’t get to it without years of digging. Captain Cury took a pewter flask from his pocket, unscrewed the top, took a swig and handed it to me. I wiped my eyes and nose on my sleeve, then drank. I’d never had strong spirits. It burned a road down my throat and made me cough, but I did stop crying.

“Thanks, Captain Cury,” I said, handing back the flask.

“All that hammering yesterday must have weakened the cliff and brought it down. There were a bit of it earlier, but I thought—” Captain Cury didn’t finish. “You’ll have the damnedest work ahead of you, getting anything out of there.” He nodded at the landslip. “My spade’s in there too. Looks like I’ll have to get another.”

It were almost comical how quickly hard work put him off looking for anything. Now it was my crocodile again – buried behind a pile of rubble.