I heard a rustling by the table, the clinking of stones knocked together. "From a crocodile's back," Mary said. "Some say they're the teeth, but Pa and I know better. See?"
I turned to look at the stone she held out. It was about the size of a twopence coin, though thicker, and round but with squared-off sides. Its surface was concave, the centre nipped in as if someone had pressed it between two fingers while it was soft. I recalled the skeleton of a lizard I'd seen at the British Museum.
"A vertebra," I corrected, holding the stone in my hand. "That is what you mean.
But there are no crocodiles in England."
Mary shrugged. "Just not seen 'em. Perhaps they've gone somewhere else. Like to Scotland."
I could not help smiling.
When I went to hand back the vertebra, Mary glanced around to see where her father was. "Keep it," she whispered.
"Thank you. What is your name?"
"Mary."
"That is very kind of you, Mary Anning. I shall treasure it."
I did treasure it. It was the first fossil I put in my cabinet.
It is funny now to think of that, our first meeting. I would never have guessed then that I would come to care about Mary more than anyone other than my sisters. How can a twenty-five-year-old middle-class lady think of friendship with a young working girl?
Yet even then, there was something about her that drew me in. We shared an interest in fossils, of course, but it was more than that. Even when she was just a girl, Mary led with her eyes, and I wanted to learn how to do so myself.
Mary came to see us a few days later, having discovered where we lived. It is not hard to find anyone in Lyme Regis--there are only a few streets. She appeared at the back door as Louise and I were in the kitchen, picking the stems off the elderflowers we'd just gathered to make into a cordial. Margaret was practising a dance step around the table while trying to convince us to make the flowers into champagne instead--though she did not offer to help, which might have made me more amenable to her suggestion. Because of her clatter and chatter we did not at first notice young Mary leaning against the door frame. It was Bessy, huffing into the kitchen with the sugar we'd sent her to get at the shops, who saw her first.
"Who's that, then? Get away from there, girl!" she cried, puffing out her doughy cheeks.
Bessy had accompanied us from London, and relished complaining about her revised situation: the steep climb from the town to Morley Cottage, the sharp sea breeze that made her chesty, the impenetrable accent of the locals she met at the Shambles, the Lyme Bay crabs that brought her out in a rash. While Bessy had been a seemingly quiet, solid girl in Bloomsbury, Lyme brought out in her a bullishness she expressed with her cheeks. Behind her back we Philpots laughed at her complaints, though at times it brought us close to giving her notice as well, when she wasn't threatening to leave.
Mary didn't budge from the door sill, Bessy's temperament having no effect.
"What you making?"
"Elderflower cordial," I replied.
"Elderflower
champagne," Margaret corrected, with an accompanying flourish of her hand.
"Never had that," Mary said, eyeing the lacy flower heads and sniffing at the muscat bloom that filled the room.
"There is such an abundance of elderflowers here in June," Margaret said. "You should be making things out of them. Isn't that what country folk do?"
I winced at my sister's patronising words. But Mary didn't seem offended. Instead her eyes followed Margaret, who was now spinning about the room in a waltz, dipping her head over one shoulder, then the other, twisting her hands in time to her humming.
Lord help her, I thought, the girl is going to admire the silliest of us. "What is it, Mary?" I did not mean to sound so short.
Mary Anning turned to me, though her eyes kept darting back to Margaret. "Pa sent me to say he'll make the cabinet for a pound."
"Will he, now?" I had gone off the idea of the cabinet if it was to be made by Richard Anning. "Tell him I will think on it."
"Who is our visitor, Elizabeth?" Louise asked, her fingers still in the elderflowers.
"This is Mary Anning, the cabinet maker's daughter."
At the name, Bessy turned from the table, where she was turning out a fruitcake she had left to cool. She gaped at Mary. "You the lightning girl?"
Mary dropped her eyes and nodded.
We all looked at her. Even Margaret stopped waltzing to stare. We had heard about the girl struck by lightning, for people still talked of it years later. It was one of those miracles small towns thrive on: children seeming drowned then spurting out water like a whale and reviving; men falling from cliffs and reappearing unscathed; boys run down by coaches and standing up with only a scratched cheek. Such everyday miracles knit communities together, giving them their legends to marvel at. It had never occurred to me when I first met her that Mary might be the lightning girl.
"Do you remember being struck?" Margaret asked.
Mary shrugged, clearly uncomfortable with our sudden interest.
Louise never liked that sort of attention either, and made an effort to break up the scrutiny. "My name is Mary too. I was named after my grandmothers. But I didn't like Grandmother Mary as much as Grandmother Louise." She paused. "Would you like to help us?"
"What do I do?" Mary stepped up to the table.
"Wash your hands first," I ordered. "Louise, look at her nails!" Mary's nails were rimmed with grey clay, her blunt fingers puckered from limestone. It was a state I would become familiar with in my own fingers.
Bessy was still staring at Mary. "Bessy, you can clean in the parlour while we're working here," I reminded her.
She grunted and picked up her mop. "I wouldn't have a girl who's been struck by lightning in my kitchen."
I tutted. "Already you're becoming as superstitious as the local people you like to look down on."
Bessy blew out her cheeks again as she banged her mop against the door jamb. I caught Louise's eye and we smiled. Then Margaret began to waltz around the table again, humming.
"For pity's sake, Margaret, do your dancing elsewhere!" I cried. "Go and dance with Bessy's mop."
Margaret laughed and pirouetted out of the door and down the hallway, to our young visitor's disappointment. By then, Louise had Mary plucking stems from the flower heads, careful to shake the pollen into the pot rather than around the kitchen. Once she understood what she was to do, Mary worked steadily, pausing only when Margaret reappeared in a lime green turban. "One feather or two?" she asked, holding up one, then another ostrich feather to the band crossing her forehead.
Mary watched Margaret with wide eyes. At that time turbans had not yet arrived in Lyme--though I can report now that Margaret pushed the fashion onto Lyme's women, and within a few years, turbans were a common sight up and down Broad Street. I am not sure they complement empire-line gowns as well as other hats, and I believe some laughed behind their hands at the sight, but isn't fashion meant to entertain?
"Thank you for helping with the elderflowers," Louise said when the flowers were soaking in hot water, sugar and lemon. "You may have a bottle of it when it's ready."
Mary Anning nodded, then turned to me. "Can I look at your curies, miss? You didn't show me the other day."
I hesitated, for I was a little shy now to reveal what I had found. She was remarkably self-possessed for a young girl. I suppose it was working from such an early age that did it, though it was tempting, too, to blame the lightning. However, I could not show my reluctance, and so I led Mary into the dining room. Most people when they enter the room remark on the impressive view of Golden Cap, but Mary did not even glance through the window. Instead she went straight to the sideboard, where I had laid out my finds, much to Bessy's disgust. "What are those?" She gestured to the slips of paper beside each fossil.