Tracy Chevalier - Remarkable Creatures

“Why don’t you leave the letter to us and we’ll have it sent to London?” Louise suggested.

Molly Anning and I both looked at her gratefully for this neat solution: Molly because responsibility for the letter reaching its destination was taken out of her hands, I because I could decide what to do without having to reveal to her that Colonel Birch had written to me. “And I shall take Mary out hunting,” I added. “I’ll keep an eye on her and encourage her.” And put what fossils I find in her basket, until she has recovered her senses, I added to myself.

“Don’t tell Mary about the letter,” Molly ordered, pulling at her coat.

“Of course not.”

Molly looked at me, her dark eyes moving back and forth over my face. “I weren’t always sure of you Philpots,” she said. “Now I am.”

When she’d gone-seeming spryer now that she was no longer weighed down with the letter-I turned to Louise. “What shall we do?”

“Wait for Margaret,” was her reply.

On our sister’s return in the evening, we three sat by the fire and discussed Molly Anning’s letter. Margaret was in her element. This was the sort of situation that she read about in the novels she favoured by authors such as Miss Jane Austen, whom Margaret was sure she’d met long ago at the Assembly Rooms the first time we visited Lyme. One of Miss Austen’s books had even featured Lyme Regis, but I did not read fiction and could not be persuaded to try it. Life itself was far messier, and didn’t end so tidily, with the heroine making the right match. We Philpot sisters were the very embodiment of that frayed life. I did not need novels to remind me of what I had missed.

Margaret held the letter in both hands. “What does it say? Is it really only about money?” She turned it over and over, as if it might magically open and reveal its contents.

“Molly Anning wouldn’t waste the time to write about anything else,” I said, knowing my sister was thinking about marriage. “And she wouldn’t lie to us.”

Margaret ran her fingers over Colonel Birch’s name. “Still, Colonel Birch must see it. It may remind him of what he has left behind.”

“He’ll be reminded that I received his letter and never responded. For if I add to the address he’ll know it’s I who has been meddling-no one else in Lyme would have his address.”

Margaret frowned. “This is not about you, Elizabeth, but about Mary. Don’t you want him to get this letter? Or would you prefer he live in perfect ignorance of Mary’s circumstances? Don’t you want the best for both parties?”

“You sound like one of your lady author’s novels,” I snapped, then stopped. I was gripping a copy of the Geological Society Journal Mr Buckland had sent me. To calm myself I took a breath. “I believe Colonel Birch is not an honourable man. Sending the letter will just raise Molly Anning’s hopes for the outcome.”

“You and Louise have already done that very thing by taking the letter off her and promising to post it!”

“That is true, and I am beginning to regret saying we would. I don’t want to play a part in a fruitless, humiliating plea.” I knew my arguments were swinging all about.

Margaret waved the letter at me. “You’re jealous of Mary gaining his attention.”

“I am not!” I said this so sharply that Margaret ducked her head. “That is ridiculous,” I added, trying to soften my tone.

There was a long silence. Margaret set the letter down, then reached over and took my hand. “ Elizabeth, you mustn’t stand in Mary’s way of getting something you were never able to.”

I pulled my hand from her grasp. “That is not why I’m objecting.”

“Why, then?” I sighed.

“Mary is a young working girl, uneducated apart from what little we and her church have taught her, and from a poor family. Colonel Birch is from a well-established Yorkshire family with an estate and a coat of arms. He would never seriously consider marrying Mary. Surely you know that. Molly Anning knows it-that is why she has only written about the money. Even Mary knows it, though she won’t say it. You are only encouraging her. He has used her to enhance his collection-for free. That is all. She’s lucky he didn’t do worse. To ask him for money, or to reestablish the connection, just prolongs the Annings’ agony. We mustn’t do so just to please your and Mary’s romantic notions.”

Margaret glared at me.

“Your Miss Austen would never allow such a marriage to take place in her novels you so love,” I went on. “If it can’t happen in fiction, surely it won’t happen in life.”

At last I made myself understood. Margaret’s face crumpled and she began to cry, great shuddering sobs that shook her entire body. Louise put her arms around her sister but said nothing, for she knew I was right. Margaret grasped on to the magic of novels because they held out hope that Mary-and she herself-might yet have a chance at marriage. While my own experience of life was limited, I knew such a thing would not happen. It hurt, but the truth often does.

“It’s not fair,” Margaret gasped as her sobs finally subsided. “He shouldn’t have paid her the attention he did. Spending so much time with her and complimenting her, giving her the locket and kissing her-”

“He kissed her?” A dart of the jealousy I was trying so hard to hide even from myself shot through me.

Margaret looked chastened. “I wasn’t meant to tell you! I wasn’t meant to tell anyone! Please don’t say anything. Mary only told me because-well, it’s just so delicious to talk it over with someone. It’s as if you relive the moment.” She fell silent, doubtless thinking about her own past kisses.

“I wouldn’t know about that,” I said, trying to limit the acid in my voice.

I did not sleep well that night. I was not used to having the power to affect someone’s life so, and did not easily carry its weight, as a man might have done.

The next day, before taking the letter to Coombe Street to be posted, I added Colonel Birch’s address to it. For all my arguments with Margaret against encouraging a continued link between Colonel Birch and Mary, I could not in the end act as if I were God, but had to let Molly Anning write what she would to him.

The postmistress glanced at the letter, then at me, her eyebrows raised, and I had to turn away before she could say anything. I am sure by the afternoon the gossip had gone all around town that desperate Miss Philpot had written to that cad Colonel Birch.

The Annings waited for an answer, but they received no letter.

I hoped that would be the end of our dealings with Colonel Birch, and that we would never see him again. He had his fossils-apart from the dapedium I would not send him-and could move on to another collecting fashion, such as insects or minerals. That is what gentlemen like Colonel Birch do.

It had never occurred to me that I might run into him in London. As Molly Anning had said, it is not Lyme. One million people lived in London compared to the 2000 in Lyme, and I rarely went to Chelsea, where I knew he lived, except to accompany Louise on her annual pilgrimage to the Physic Garden there. I never expected the tide would turn up two such different pebbles side by side.

We took our annual trip to London in the spring, eager to escape Lyme for a time, to see our family and make the usual rounds of visits to friends, shops, galleries and the-?flatres. When the weather was not good we often went to the British Museum, housed in Montague Mansion close to our brother’s house. Having regularly visited since we were children, we knew the collection intimately.

One particularly rainy day we had separated and were each in different rooms, with our own favourite exhibits. Margaret was in the Gallery, hovering over a collection of cameos and sealstones, while Louise was in the Upper Floor with Mary Delany’s exquisite florilegium, a collection of pictures of plants made of cut paper. I was in the Saloon, where the Natural History collection ranged over several rooms-mostly displays of rocks and minerals, but now with four rooms of fossils that had recently been rearranged and added to. There were a fair number of specimens from the Lyme area, including a few more fish that I had donated.