Tracy Chevalier - Remarkable Creatures

When I looked up, he appeared just as I knew he would, riding up on his borrowed chestnut horse and looking down at me. “Mary,” he said.

“Colonel Birch,” I replied, and curtseyed very low, as if I were a lady.

Colonel Birch dismounted, reached for my hand and kissed it in front of all the visitors rummaging through the curies and the villagers walking past. I didn’t care. When he looked up at me, still bent over my hand, I spied behind his gladness uncertainty, and I knew then that Elizabeth Philpot had not been lying about the widow lady. As much as I had wanted to disbelieve her, she was not the sort to lie. As gently as I could I pulled my hand from Colonel Birch’s grasp. Then the shadow of uncertainty become a true flame of sorrow, and we stood looking at each other without speaking.

Over Colonel Birch’s shoulder there was a movement that distracted me from his sad eyes, and I saw a couple come arm in arm along Bridge Street, he stocky and strong, she bobbing up and down at his side like a boat in rough water. It was Fanny Miller, who had lately married Billy Day, one of the quarrymen who helped me dig out monsters. Even the quarrymen were taken, then. Fanny stared at us. When she met my eye she clutched her husband’s arm and hurried away along the street as fast as her game leg would let her.

Then I knew what I would do with Colonel Birch, widow lady or no. It would be my present to myself, for I was not likely to have another chance. I nodded at him. “Go and see Mam, sir. She’s been expecting you. I’ll find you after.”

I did not want to watch him hand over the money. Though I was grateful for it, I did not want to see it. I only wanted to see him. When he had tied up the horse and gone inside, I packed away the curies, then went quick up Butter Market and followed Colonel Birch’s path in reverse. I knew he would lodge as he always did at the Queen’s Arms in Charmouth, and so would pass this way again. When I got to Lord Henley’s field off Charmouth Lane I crossed to a stile and sat on it to wait.

Colonel Birch held his back so straight as he rode he looked like a tin soldier. With the sun low behind him and casting a long shadow before, I could not see his face until he pulled up alongside me. As I climbed to the top rung of the stile and balanced there, he took my hand so that I would not fall.

“Mary, I cannot marry you,” he said.

“I know, sir. It don’t matter.”

“You are sure?”

“I am. It is my birthday today. I am twenty-one years old and this is what I want.”

I was not a horse rider, but that day I had no fear as I reached over and swung into the space between his arms.

He took me inland. Colonel Birch knew the surrounding countryside better than I did, for I never normally went into the fields, but spent all of my time on the shore. We rode through dusk’s shadows lit here and there with panes of sunlight, up to the main road to Exeter. Once across we headed down darkening fields. Along the way we did not murmur sweet words to each other like courting couples, for we were not courting. Nor did I relax in his arms, for the horse swayed and the saddle pushed hard against me and I had to concentrate so I wouldn’t fall off. But I was where I wanted to be and did not mind.

An orchard at the bottom of the field waited for us. When I lay down with Colonel Birch it was on a sheet of apple blossom petals covering the ground like snow. There I found out that lightning can come from deep inside the body. I have no regret discovering that.

I learned something else that evening, which come to me afterwards. I was lying in his arms looking up at the sky, where I counted four stars, when he asked, “What will you do with the money I have given your family, Mary?”

“Pay off our debts and buy a new table.”

Colonel Birch chuckled. “That is very practical of you. Will you not do something for yourself?”

“I suppose I could buy a new bonnet.” Mine had just been crushed under our coupling.

“What about something more ambitious?”

I was silent.

“For example,” Colonel Birch continued, “you could move to a house with a bigger shop. Up Broad Street, for example, to where there’s a good shop front, with a big window and more light in which to display your fossils. That way you would get more trade.”

“So you’re expecting me to keep on finding and selling curies, are you, sir? That I’ll never marry, but run a shop.”

“I did not say that.”

“It’s all right, sir. I know I won’t marry. No one wants someone like me for a wife.”

“That is not what I meant, Mary. You misunderstand me.”

“Do I, sir?” I rolled off his shoulder and lay flat on the ground. Even since we had been talking it seemed the sky had got darker, and more and more stars had joined the first scattering.

Colonel Birch sat up stiffly, for he was old, and lying on the ground must hurt him. He looked down at me. It was too dark to see his expression. “I was thinking about your future as a fossil hunter, not as a wife. There are many women-most women, in fact-who can be perfectly good wives. But there is only one of you. Do you know, when I set up the auction in London I met many people who professed to know a great deal about fossils: what they are, how they came to be here, what they mean. But none of them knows even half of what you understand.”

“Mr Buckland does. And Henry De La Beche. And what about Cuvier? They say that Frenchman knows more than any of us.”

“That may be. But the others don’t have the instinct for it that you do, Mary. Your knowledge may be self-taught and come from experience rather than from books, but it is no less valuable for that. You have spent a great deal of time with specimens; you have studied their anatomies and seen their variations and subtleties. You recognise the uniqueness of the ichthyosaurus, for example, that it is not like anything we have ever imagined.”

But I didn’t want to talk about me, or about curies. There were so many stars now that I couldn’t count them. I felt very small, pinned to the ground under the knowledge of them all. They were beginning to hollow me out. “How far away do you think those stars are?”

Colonel Birch turned his face upward. “Very far. Farther than we can even imagine.”

Perhaps it was because of what had just happened to me, of the lightning that come from inside, which made me open up to larger, stranger thoughts. Looking up at the stars so far away, I begun to feel there was a thread running between the earth and them. Another thread was strung out too, connecting the past to the future, with the ichie at one end, dying all that long time ago and waiting for me to find it. I didn’t know what was at the other end of the thread. These two threads were so long I couldn’t even begin to measure them, and where one met the other, there was me. My life led up to that moment, then led away again, like the tide making its highest mark on the beach and then retreating.

“Everything is so big and old and far away,” I said, sitting up with the force of it. “God help me, for it does scare me.”

Colonel Birch put his hand on my head and stroked my hair, which was all matted from my lying on the ground. “There is no need to fear,” he said, “for you are here with me.”

“Only now,” I said. “Just for this moment, and then I will be alone again in the world. It is hard when there’s no one to hold on to.”

He had no answer to that, and I knew he never would. I lay back down and looked at the stars until I had to close my eyes.

It is rare for anything reported in the Western Flying Post to surprise me. Most are predictable stories: a description of a livestock auction in Bridport, or an account of a public meeting on the widening of a Weymouth road, or warnings of pickpockets at the Frome Fair. Even the stories of more unusual events where lives are changed-a man transported for stealing a silver watch, a fire burning down half a village-I still read with a sense of distance, for they have little effect on me. Of course if the man had stolen my watch, or half of Lyme burned down, I would be more interested. Still, I read the paper dutifully, for it makes me at least aware of the wider region, rather than trapped in an inward-looking town.