Tracy Chevalier - Remarkable Creatures

“The plesiosaurus was delayed in its arrival,” Mr Lyell explained, “and did not reach London until almost two weeks after the Society meeting at which Reverend Conybeare was speaking of it. You know, Miss Anning, at the meeting Reverend Buckland was very complimentary of your collecting skills.”

“He was?”

“Yes, indeed. Now, when the plesiosaurus arrived at last, the men could not get it up the stairs, for it was too wide.”

“Six feet wide, the frame round it was. I know, for I built it. We had to turn it sideways to get it out this door.”

“Of course. They tried the better part of a day to get it up to the meeting rooms. Finally, though, it had to be left in the entranceway, where many Society members came to look at it.”

I watched the Frenchman crawl between the ichie and plesie to get round to the plesie’s front paddle. I gestured with my head. “Did he see it?”

“Not in London, but when we went to Birmingham from Oxford, we stopped en route at Stowe House, where the Duke of Buckingham has taken it.” Mr Lyell, though polite as a gentleman ought to be, made a little face. “It is a splendid specimen, but rather swamped by the Duke’s extensive collection of glittering objects.”

I paused, my hand on the ichie’s jaw. So this poor specimen would go to a rich man’s house, to be ignored amongst all the silver and gold. I could have wept. “So is he-” I nodded at Monsieur Prévost “-going to tell Monsieur Cuvier that the plesiosaurus isn’t a fake? That it really does have a small head and a long neck and I weren’t just putting two animals together?”

Monsieur Prévost glanced up from his study of the plesie with a keen look that made me think he understood more English than he spoke.

Mr Lyell smiled at me. “There is no need, Miss Anning. Baron Cuvier is fully convinced of the specimen, even without Monsieur Prévost having seen it. He has had a great deal of correspondence about the plesiosaurus with various of your champions: Reverend Buckland, Conybeare, Mr Johnson, Mr Cumberland-”

“I wouldn’t call them my champions exactly,” I muttered. “They like me when they need something.”

“They have a great deal of respect for you, Miss Anning,” Charles Lyell countered.

“Well.” I was not going to argue with him about what the men thought of me. I had work to do. I begun scraping again.

Constant Prévost got to his feet, dusted off his knees and spoke to Mr Lyell. “Monsieur Prévost would like to know if you have a buyer for the plesiosaurus,” he explained. “If not, he would like to purchase it for the museum in Paris.”

I dropped my blade and sat back on my heels. “For Cuvier? Monsieur Cuvier wants one of my plesies?” I looked so astonished that both men begun to laugh.

It took Mam no time to bring me down from the cloud I was floating on. “What do Frenchmen pay for curies?” she wanted to know the minute the men had left to dine at the Three Cups and she could leave the table outside. “Are they looser with their purse strings or do they want it even cheaper than an Englishman?”

“I don’t know, Mam-we didn’t talk figures,” I lied. I would find a better time to tell her I were so taken with the Frenchman that I’d agreed to sell it to him for just ten pounds. “I don’t care how much he pays,” I added. “I just know Monsieur Cuvier thinks well enough of my work to want more of it. That be pay enough for me.”

Mam leaned in the doorway and give me a sly look. “So you’re calling the plesie yours, are you?”

I frowned, but did not answer.

“The Days found it, didn’t they?” she continued, relentless as always. “They found it and dug it up, and you bought it off them the way Mr Buckland or Lord Henley or Colonel Birch bought specimens off you and called them theirs. You become a collector like them. Or a dealer, as you’re selling it on.”

“That’s not fair, Mam. I been a hunter all my life. And I do find most of my specimens. It’s not my fault the Days found one and didn’t know what to do with it. If they had dug it out and cleaned it and sold it, it would be theirs. But they didn’t want that, and come to me. I oversaw them and paid them for their work, but the plesie’s with me now. I’m responsible for it, and so it’s mine.”

Mam rolled her tongue over her teeth. “You been saying you ain’t had recognition by the men, who call the curies theirs once they bought ’em. Do that mean you’ll tell the Frenchman to put the Days’ names on the label along with yours when they display it in Paris?”

“Of course I won’t. They won’t list me on the label anyway. No one else ever has.” I said this to try to distract from Mam’s argument, for I knew she was right.

“Maybe the difference between hunter and collector ain’t so great as you been making out all these years.”

“Mam! Why are you going on about such a thing when I’ve just had good news? Can’t you leave be?”

Mam sighed and straightened her cap as she prepared to go back out to customers at the table. “All a mother wants is for her children to settle into their lives. I seen you worried about recognition for your work these many years. But you’d be better off worrying about the pay. That’s what really matters, isn’t it? Curies is business.”

Though I knew she meant it kindly, her words cut. Yes, I needed to be paid for what I did. But fossils were more than money to me now-they had become a kind of life, a whole stone world that I were a part of. Sometimes I even thought about my own body after my death, and it turning to stone thousands of years later. What would someone make of me if they dug me up?

But Mam were right: I had become part not just of the hunting and finding, but of the buying and the selling too, and it was no longer so clear what I did. Maybe that was the true price of my fame.

What I wanted to do more than anything was to go up Silver Street to Morley Cottage and sit at the Philpots’ dining room table spread with Miss Elizabeth’s fossil fish and talk to her. Bessy would bang a cup of tea in front of me and slump off, and we would watch the light change over Golden Cap. I looked up at a watercolour Miss Elizabeth had made of that view and given me not long before our argument-trees and cottages in the foreground, the hills along the coast washed in soft light as they backed into the distance. There were no people visible in the painting, but I often felt as if I were there somewhere, just out of sight, looking for curies on the shore.

The next two days I was busy with Mr Lyell and Monsieur Prévost, taking them upon beach to show them where the beasts had come from and teach them how to find other curies. Neither had the eye, though they found a few bits and pieces. Even then my luck were with me, for in front of them I found yet another ichthyosaurus. We were standing on the ledge near to the other ichie’s site when I spotted a length of jaw and teeth almost under the foot of the Frenchman. With my hammer I chipped off slices of rock to expose the eye, the vertebrae and ribs. It was a good specimen, apart from a crushed tail which looked like a cart wheel run over it. I confess it were a pleasure to wield my hammer and bring the creature into sight before their eyes. “Miss Anning, you are truly a conjurer!” Mr Lyell exclaimed. Monsieur Prévost too was impressed, though he could not say so in English. I was just as happy that he could not speak, for it meant I could enjoy being in his company without having to worry about what his pretty words might mean.

The men wanted to see more, so I had to fetch the Days to dig out that ichie while I took them to the Ammonite Graveyard at Monmouth Beach, and on along to Pinhay Bay to hunt crinoids. Only once they’d left to go to Weymouth and to Portland were I finally free to return to the plesie. I would have to clean it fast, for Monsieur Prévost planned to leave for France in ten days. I would be working day and night to get it ready, but it would be worth it. That was how this trade was: for months every day would be just like the last, but for the changes in weather, with me hunting upon beach. Then along come three monsters and two strangers and suddenly I would have to stay up all hours to finish preparing a specimen.