against the smooth flint. Its pattern stands out when everything else is a jumble.
Everyone hunts differently. Miss Elizabeth studies the cliff face and the ledges and the loose stones so hard you think her head will burst. She does find things, but it takes her much more effort. She don’t have the eye like me.
When he hunted, my brother Joe had a different method again, and hated my way. He is three years older than me, but when we were young it felt sometimes like he was years and years older. He was like a little grown up, slow and serious and careful. It was our job to find curies and bring them back to Pa, though sometimes we set about cleaning them too, if Pa were busy with his cabinets. Joe never liked to be outside when it were blowy. He found curies, though. He was good at it even if he didn’t want to do it. He had the eye. His way was to take a patch of beach, divide it into squares, and search each square equally, going back and forth at an even pace, slow and steady. He found more than me, but I found the unusual bits, the crocodile ribs and teeth, the bezoar stones and sea urchins, the things you didn’t expect.
Pa hunted by using a long pole to poke amongst the rocks so he wouldn’t have to bend over. He learned this from Mr Crookshanks, the friend who first taught Pa about curies. He jumped off Gun Cliff behind our house when I was only three. Pa said he’d had too much debt and even curies couldn’t keep him from the workhouse. Not that Pa learned from Mr Crookshanks’ mistake. Pa was always looking to find what he called the monster that would pay all our debts. Over the years we’d found teeth and verteberries and what looked like ribs, as well as funny little cubes like kernels of corn, and other bones we couldn’t make out but thought must come from a big animal like a crocodile. Miss Elizabeth showed one to me once when I was cleaning curies for her. She had a book full of drawings of all sorts of animals and their skeletons, by a Frenchman called Cuvier.
Pa didn’t hunt as much as we did, for he had his cabinet making, though he’d come out when he could. He preferred curies to woodwork, which upset Mam, for the money was unpredictable, and hunting took him away from Cockmoile Square and the family. She probably suspected he preferred being alone upon beach to a house full of squally babies – for she did have some squallers. All of them cried but Joe and me. Mam never come upon beach, except to shout at Pa if he went hunting on a Sunday and shamed her at Chapel. Though it didn’t stop him, he agreed not to take Joe and me out on Sundays.
Other than us there were but one other who sold curies: an ancient hostler called William Lock, who worked at the Queen’s Arms at Charmouth, where coaches between London and Exeter changed horses. William Lock found he could sell fossils to the travellers as they stretched their legs and looked about. As fossils were known as curiosities, or curies, he come to be called Captain Cury. Though he’d been finding and selling fossils for years – longer even than Pa had – he didn’t carry a hammer, but picked up whatever was lying easily to hand, or dug things up with the spade he kept with him. He was a mean old man who looked at me funny. I stayed away from him.
We would see Captain Cury from time to time upon beach, but until Miss Elizabeth come to Lyme, the shore were deserted of other cury hunters apart from us. Mostly I went looking with Joe or with Pa. Sometimes, though, I went down upon beach with Fanny Miller. She was the same age as me and lived just up the river from Lyme, past the cloth factory, in what we called Jericho. Her father was a wood cutter who sold wood to Pa, her mam worked at the factory, and the Millers were members of the Congregationalist Chapel in Coombe Street like us. Lyme was full of Dissenters, though it had a proper church too, St Michael’s, that was always trying to lure us back. We Annings wouldn’t go, though – we were proud to think differently from the traditional Church of England, even if I couldn’t really say what those differences were.
Fanny was a pretty thing, small and fair-haired and delicate, with blue eyes I envied. We used to play finger games during Sunday services when it got dull, and would run up and down the river chasing sticks and leaves we’d made into boats, or picking watercress. Though Fanny always preferred the river, sometimes she would go with me upon beach between Lyme and Charmouth, though she would never go as far as Black Ven, for she thought the cliff there looked evil and stones would tumble down on her head. We would build villages from pebbles, or fill in the holes tiny clams called piddocks made in the rock ledges. At the same time I would keep an eye out for curies, so it was never just play for me.
Fanny had the eye but hated to use it. She loved pretty things: chunks of milky quartz, striped pebbles, knobs of fool’s gold. Her jewels, she called them. She would find these treasures, yet wouldn’t touch good ammos and bellies even when she knew I wanted them. They scared her. “I don’t like them,” she would say with a shiver, but could never explain why, other than to say “They’re ugly,” if I pressed her, or “Mam says they’re from the fairies.” She said a sea urchin was a fairy loaf, which was their bread, and if you kept it on a shelf your milk wouldn’t go sour. I told her what Pa taught me: that ammos were snakes that had lost their heads, that bellies were thunderbolts God had thrown down, that gryphies were the Devil’s own toenails. That scared her even more. I knew they were just stories. If the Devil really shed that many toenails, he would have to have had thousands of feet. And if lightning was to create that many bellies, it would be striking all day long. But Fanny couldn’t think like that, and would hold on to her fear. I’ve met plenty of others the same – frightened of what they don’t understand.
But I loved Fanny, she being my one true friend then. Our family weren’t popular in Lyme, for people thought Pa’s interest in fossils odd. Even Mam did, though she would defend him if she heard talk about him at the Shambles or outside Chapel.
Fanny did not remain my friend, though, no matter how many jewels I brought back for her from the beach. It weren’t just that the Millers were suspicious of fossils; they were suspicious of me too, especially once I started helping the Philpots, who people in town made fun of as the London ladies too peculiar even to get a Lyme man. Fanny would never come if I was going upon beach with Miss Elizabeth. She got more and more funny with me, making comments about Miss Elizabeth’s bony face and Miss Margaret’s silly turbans, and pointing out holes in my boots and clay under my nails. I begun to wonder if she were my friend after all.
Then when we did go along the shore one day, Fanny were so sullen that I let us get cut off by the tide, as a punishment for her mood. When she saw the last strip of sand next to the cliff disappear under a foamy wave, Fanny begun to cry. “What we going to do?” she kept sobbing.
I watched, with no desire to comfort her. “We can wade through the water or climb up to the cliff path,” I said. “You choose.” Myself, I did not want to wade a quarter of a mile along the cliff to the point where the town begun on higher ground. The water was freezing and the sea rough, and I could not swim, but I did not tell her that.
Fanny gazed equally fearfully at the churning sea and the steep climb we faced. “I cannot choose,” she squealed. “I cannot!”
I let her cry a little more, then led her up the rough path, pulling and pushing her to the top where the cliff path goes between Charmouth and Lyme. Once she’d recovered, Fanny would not look at me, and when we neared the town she run off, and I did not try to catch her up. I had never been cruel to anyone, and did not like myself for it. But it was the start of the feeling I had ever after that I did not entirely belong to the people I ought to in Lyme. Whenever I run into Fanny Miller – at Chapel, on Broad Street, along the river – her big blue eyes turned hard like ice covering a puddle, and she talked about me behind her hand with her new friends. I felt even more like an outsider.
Our troubles truly begun when I was eleven and we lost Pa. Some say it were his own fault for taking a bad tumble one night coming back to Lyme along the cliff path. He swore he’d had no drink, but of course we could all smell it. He was lucky he weren’t killed going over, but he was laid up for months. He couldn’t make cabinets, and the curies Joe and I found only brought in a bit, so the debt he had already got us into become much worse.
