flinched. Was it so very obvious that I was not married? Of course it was. For one thing, I had no husband with me, looking after and indulging me. But there was something else about married women that I noticed, their solid smugness at not having to worry about the course of their future. Married women were set like jelly in a mould, whereas spinsters like me were formless and unpredictable.
I patted my basket. “I have my own fossils, thank you. I am here to see your father. Is he in?” Mary nodded towards steps that led down to an open door. I ducked into a dim, filthy room crammed with wood and stone, the floor covered with shavings and gritty dust. It smelled so strongly of varnish that I almost backed out, but I could not, for Richard Anning was staring at me, his sharp, shapely nose pinning me to the spot like a dart. I never like people who lead with their noses: they pull everything to the centre of their faces, and I feel trapped by their concentration.
He was a lithe man of medium height, with dark, lustrous hair and a strong jaw. His eyes were the kind of dark blue that hides things. It always annoyed me how handsome he was, given his harsh, teasing nature and his sometimes rough manners. He did not pass on his looks to his daughter, who might have had more use for them.
He was perched over a small cabinet with glass doors, holding a brush coated with varnish. I took against Richard Anning from the start because he did not even set down the brush, and barely glanced at my specimens as I described what I wanted. “A guinea,” he announced.
It was an outrageous figure for a specimen cabinet. Did he think he could take advantage of a London spinster? Perhaps he thought I was well off. For a moment, as I glared at his handsome face, I considered waiting for my brother to deal with him when he next came down from London. But that could be many months, and besides, I could not rely on my brother for everything. I was going to have to make my way in Lyme without the tradesmen laughing behind my back.
It was clear to me from looking around his shop that Richard Anning needed the business. I should use that to my advantage. “It is a pity that you have suggested such an exorbitant sum,” I said, wrapping my fossils in muslin and placing them back in my basket. “I would have made your name prominent on each case, and everyone who looked at my collection would have seen it. Now, however, I shall have to go elsewhere, to someone more reasonable.”
“You going to show them to others?” Richard Anning nodded at my basket, his incredulity deciding me: I would find someone in Axminster, or even Exeter if I had to, rather than give this man my business. I knew I would never like him.
“Good day to you, sir,” I said, turning to sweep up the steps. I was thwarted in my dramatic departure, however, by Mary, standing square in the entrance and blocking my way. “What curies you got?” she demanded, her eyes on my basket.
“Clearly nothing that would be of interest to you,” I muttered, pushing past her and out to the square. I hated being stung by Richard Anning’s tone. Why should I care for a cabinet maker’s opinion? In truth, I’d thought my bits and pieces rather fine, for someone new to finding fossils. I had found a complete ammonite, as well as parts of several others, and the long shaft of a belemnite, the pointed tip intact rather than broken, as they so often are. Now I could see, even as I passed the Annings’ table in my anger, that their fossils far exceeded mine in both variety and beauty. They were whole, polished, varied, and abundant. There were specimens displayed on the table I hadn’t even known were fossils: bivalves of sorts, a heart-shaped rock with a pattern on it, a creature with five long waving arms.
Mary had ignored my rude remark and followed me out. “You got any verteberries?”
I paused, my back to her, the table, the whole wretched workshop. “What is a verteberry?”
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,
