Tracy Chevalier - Remarkable Creatures

At this the crew jeered, for they had little respect for travel by land, I had learned during the trip. They saw it as slow, rough and muddy. Others-coachmen, for instance-might retort that the sea was slow, rough and wet.

Whoever was right, Mary’s plesiosaurus was now somewhere in a long, slow train of carts grinding through Kent towards London. Having left a week before me, the specimen would now probably arrive in London after me, too late for the Geological Society meeting.

We reached London in the early hours of the fourth day, docking at a wharf on Tooley Street. After the relative calm on board, all now became a chaos of unloading by torchlight, of shouts and whistles, of coaches and carts clattering away full of people and cargo. It was a shock to the senses after four days of Nature providing her own constant rhythms. The people and the noise and the lights reminded me too that I had come to London for a reason, not to enjoy anonymity and solitude whilst eyeing the wider horizon.

I stood on deck and looked out for my brother at the quayside, but he was not there. The letter I had posted at the same time as I left must have got stuck in the mud en route and lost its race with me. Though I had never been before, I had heard about London ’s docks, how crowded and dirty and dangerous they were, especially for a lady on her own with no one expecting her. Perhaps it was because the darkness made everything more mysterious, but the men unloading the Unity, even the sailors I had got to know on board, now appeared much rougher and harder.

I hesitated to disembark. There was no one to turn to for help, though: the other passengers-even the cocksure man from Honiton-had hurried away in ungentleman-like haste. I could have panicked. Before the journey I might have. But something had shifted in me while I spent all that time on deck watching the horizon: I was responsible for myself. I was Elizabeth Philpot, and I collected fossil fish. Fish are not always beautiful, but they have pleasing shapes, they are practical, and they lead with their eyes. There is nothing shamful about them

I picked up my bag and stepped off the boat amidst a score of bustling men, many of whom whistled and shouted at me. Before anyone could do more than call out, I walked quickly to the Customs House, despite swaying with the shock of being on land again. “I would like a cab, please,” I said to a surprised clerk, interrupting him as he ticked items on a list. He had a moustache that fluttered like a moth over his mouth. “I shall wait here until you fetch me one,” I added, setting down my bag. I did not stick out my chin and sharpen my jaw, but gazed steadily at him with my Philpot eyes.

He found me a cab.

The Geological Society’s offices in Covent Garden were not far from my brother’s house, but to get there one had to pass through St Giles and Seven Dials, with its beggars and thieves, and I was not keen to do so on foot. Thus on the evening of the 20th February, 1824, I waited in a cab across from 20 Bedford Street, my nephew Johnny beside me. There was snow on the street, and we huddled under our cloaks against the cold.

My brother was horrified that I had come all the way to London on a ship because of Mary. When he was woken in the middle of the night to find me at the door, he looked so ill with surprise that I almost regretted I had come. Being quietly tucked away in Lyme, my sisters and I had rarely given him cause to worry, and I did not like to do so now.

John did everything he could to persuade me not to go to the Geological Society, bar expressly forbidding me. It seemed he was only willing to indulge me in unusual behaviour just the once, when he had escorted me to Bullock’s to view Colonel Birch’s auction preview. Mercifully he had never found out I attended the auction itself. He would not help me with something so odd and risky again. “They will not let you in, for you are a lady, and their charter does not allow it,” he began, using first the legal argument. We were in his study, the door closed, as if John were trying to protect his family from me, his erratic sister. “Even if they let you in they would not listen to you, for you are not a member. Then,” he added, holding up a hand as I tried to interrupt, “you have no business discussing and defending Mary. It is not your place to.”

“She is my friend,” I replied, “and no one else will take her part if I don’t.”

John looked at me as if I were a small child trying to convince my nurse I could have another helping of pudding. “You have been very foolish, Elizabeth. You have come all this way, making yourself ill en route-”

“It is just a cold, nothing more.”

“-ill en route, and worrying us unnecessarily.” Now he was using guilt. “And to no purpose, for you will gain no audience.”

“I can at least try. It is truly foolish to come all this way and then not even try.”

“What exactly do you want from these men?”

“I want to remind them of Mary’s careful methods of finding and preserving fossils, and to convince them to agree to defend her publicly against Cuvier’s attack on her character.”

“They will never do that,” John said, running his finger along the spiral of his nautilus paperweight. “Though they may defend the plesiosaurus, they will not discuss Mary. She is only the hunter.”

“Only the hunter!” I stopped myself. John was a London solicitor, with a certain way of thinking. I was a stubborn Lyme spinster, with my own mind. We were not going to agree, nor either of us convince the other. And he was not my target anyway; I must save my words for more important men.

John would not agree to accompany me to the meeting, and so I did not ask, but turned to an alternative-my nephew. Johnny was now a tall, lanky youth who led with his feet, had a residual fondness for his aunt and an active fondness for mischief. He had never told his parents about discovering me sneaking out of the house to go to the auction at Bullock’s, and this shared secret bound us. It was this closeness I now relied on to help me.

I was lucky, for John and my sister-in-law were dining out on the Friday evening of the Geological Society meeting. I had not told him when the meeting was to take place, but allowed him to believe it was the following week. The afternoon of the supper I took to bed, saying my cold was worse. My sister-in-law pursed her lips in clear disapproval of my folly. She did not like unexpected visitors, or the sort of problems that, for all my quiet life at Lyme, I seemed to trail behind me. She hated fossils, and disorder, and unanswered questions. Whenever I brought up topics like the possible age of the earth, she twisted her hands in her lap and changed the subject as soon as it was polite to.

When she and my brother had gone out for the evening, I crept from my room and went to find Johnny and explain what I needed from him. He rose to the occasion admirably, coming up with an excuse for his departure to satisfy the servants, fetching a cab and hurrying me into it without anyone in the house discovering. It was absurd that I had to go to such lengths to take any sort of action out of the ordinary.

However, it was also a relief to have company. Now we sat in the cab on Bedford Street across from the Geological Society house, Johnny having gone in to check and found that the members were still dining in rooms on the first floor. Through the front windows we could see lights there and the occasional head bobbing about. The formal meeting would begin in half an hour or so.

“What shall we do, Aunt Elizabeth?” he demanded. “Storm the citadel?”

“No, we wait. They will all stand so that the meal can be cleared away. At that moment I will go in and seek out Mr Buckland. He is about to become President of the Society, and I am sure he will listen to me.”