Chapter 1
LYME REGIS, ENGLAND
The sky was leaden as Emeline trudged along the rocky beach beside her cousin, Louise, back to their cottage in Lyme Regis. The wind from the English Channel stung her eyes. She was hungry, wet and, she admitted privately, discouraged.
“How many days have we been doing just the same thing?” Emeline heard herself ask under her breath.
Mary Anning, the great fossilist, was walking a short distance ahead of them, and certainly she would never ask such a question.
Her passion for hunting and excavating fossils was far stronger than any selfish notions about drudgery.
Louise, pale and bedraggled, glanced over and gave a rueful laugh. “I could not possibly begin to count them.” She reached out to touch Emeline’s hand. “Do I detect a seed of doubt?”
“Doubt?” Their skirts were tied up, their heavy shoes were wet and muddy, and Emeline wondered if she would ever be able to get the smell of salt water and dead sea animals out of her pores.
She held up a silencing hand to her cousin.
“I’ll tell you when we’ve eaten. By then I may have changed my mind. ”
Mary Anning turned and brandished her bucket of fossils: ammonites, devil’s toes, bullet-shaped belemnites, and vertebrae from the immense plesiosaur, who had lived in this place thousands of years ago.
“It were a good day!” she exclaimed. “But I must get home to look after Mam. She’s poorly.
” The plain woman, now in her fifth decade, took a few more steps before adding over one sloping shoulder, “Louise, ye are going to discover your own great plessie soon. I feel it.”
Emeline and Louise watched as their mentor trudged off, limping slightly, toward the home she shared with her mother above Anning’s Fossil Depot.
Mary’s workshop was there as well, where she labored over her discoveries by candlelight, assembling the fragments and sketching her progress.
It was certainly true that fossils of every size took precedence over furnishings or the comforts of home.
For an instant, Emeline felt a sharp pang of longing for her own family home, filled with the laughter of loved ones, the fragrances of delicious food, music, treasured books, and beautiful furniture.
Louise glanced over, seeming to sense Emeline’s mood.
“There will be soup for us tonight,” she said as they began to climb up Broad Street, past the empty market stalls, the Three Cups Inn, and the Assembly Rooms. Her slender hand reached out to touch Emeline’s back. “Tell me what you are thinking.”
“Oh… I am only pondering Mary’s life here in Lyme,” Emeline said as a wave of melancholy swept over her.
“Of course she has made tremendous discoveries, but it seems she has sacrificed her own happiness for the fossils. Not just a husband and children…but also a wide circle of friends and the pleasures of concerts, lectures, museums…” Her voice trailed off as a flock of sheep interrupted their progress up the hill.
“Louise, when you came here, years ago, to work alongside Mary Anning, did you mean to stay forever?”
Her cousin’s cheeks went pink.
“I didn’t make a plan,” Louise confessed.
“I wasn’t certain what might happen, only that I felt comfortable and fulfilled here in Lyme, helping Mary and learning so much.
It’s true that the days do run together, but when there is a magnificent, rare discovery, nothing can compare with the thrilling sense of having been part of a miracle. ”
They had reached the door of their tiny, whitewashed cottage perched high above the sea.
“Yes, that’s true. A miracle.” Emeline thought back to her very first visit to Lyme Regis, when she was ten years old.
Even the discovery of an ammonite fossil, a perfectly spiraled work of art, had felt like a magic trick.
She couldn’t wait to recreate that thrill.
In later years, when she watched Mary Anning uncover the first pieces of a prehistoric ichthyosaur and daily helped to assemble the entire fossilized creature, Emeline had glowed with the wonder of it all.
A high-pitched, plaintive mee-oww broke into her reverie.
Louise opened the cottage door to reveal their new soot-gray kitten, Bartholomew, poised to spring.
When he had appeared one day in their garden, wet and pitiful, the two women immediately adopted him.
Bartholomew was the closest thing either of them had to a child.
Now the kitten fairly leaped into Louise’s arms, and Emeline joined in the reunion, laughing and kissing Bartholomew’s tiny head.
“Ow, he bit me!” exclaimed Louise. “His teeth are sharp as razors!” Setting the kitten down on the threadbare rug, she shook a finger at him. “You should be more grateful to have a home, rascal.”
“Such as it is,” Emeline parried with a rueful laugh as she surveyed the cramped cottage with its low ceilings and unremitting smell of damp.
The proceeds from their fossil sales paid the modest rent, but Emeline had begun to consider the limits of their future in the small coastal town.
Glancing over, she saw that Louise was watching her.
“I shall warm our supper and then we’ll talk,” Louise said in a solemn voice.
Emeline nodded and went off to wash up in the dim bedchamber she shared with her cousin.
In one corner there was a table she used for sketching, and on top of her supplies lay the most recent letter from her father.
Her heart squeezed at the sight of it. With a sigh, Emeline dried her face on a linen towel, slipped the letter into the pocket of her skirt, and went to join Louise.
The kitchen felt cozy yet confined, Emeline thought as they finished the last of their vegetable soup.
The stove provided warmth against the cold evening, and the company was very fine, but when she considered the prospect of continuing in this situation for the rest of her life, she felt a sudden chill.
“Something is weighing on you,” Louise said. She dabbed at her mouth with a napkin and sat up straight. “You promised to say more after we had eaten.” Pushing a small dish of rice pudding across to her, she added, “Out with it.”
Emeline did not eat the pudding. Instead, she brought the folded paper out of her skirt pocket and opened it. “I’ve had a letter from Papa. As you well know, he can be rather…”
“Charmingly dictatorial?” Louise supplied sweetly. “Uncle Justin is one of my favorite people, but he can find it difficult to stand by and allow others to make their own choices.”
She nodded. “It isn’t easy to be his daughter, but as Mama always reminds me, I am also a Raveneau. I must chart my own course in life, no matter what Papa says.”
“Indeed, you have ever been fearless!” Louise proclaimed admiringly. “That is the reason you abandoned London during your second Season and came here to work alongside Mary Anning and me. We don’t care a button for the haut ton…or men!”
“Very true.” Emeline flushed slightly as a memory of the night of Lord and Lady Riven’s Spring Ball reared up inside her. “I couldn’t remain there another day,” she agreed.
Glad for a distraction, Emeline dipped her spoon into the rice pudding and tasted it, reflecting again that perhaps her sweet cousin had another reason to turn her back on men.
For years, Louise had quietly carried a torch for Charles, Emeline’s half-brother from Mama’s earlier marriage to Sir Harry Brandreth, Baronet.
Charles could be insufferably pompous, but quiet Louise had always perceived other qualities in him.
When his attempt to marry into the aristocracy failed, Charles had studied architecture and departed for Rome.
During the intervening decade, Louise had scarcely set foot outside of Lyme Regis, devoting herself to her work with Mary Anning.
“What about you?” Emeline asked for the second time that day. “Do you intend to spend the rest of your life like this? You may as well be in a nunnery.” She paused as Bartholomew leaped up onto her lap, then forced herself to add, “I cannot imagine that you want to end like Mary Anning.”
The sight of Louise’s delicate face turning pink in the candlelight was answer enough.
“You are a brilliant fossilist,” Emeline went on, “and you have made many excellent discoveries, but there has to be more to life than this.”
“I gather that my Uncle Justin has written to inform us what that might be,” her cousin murmured dryly.
“At first, I dismissed his letter out of hand, but I found myself thinking about it all day today.” Her eyes stung.
“Mary lives in such a small, constricted world, rather like our tiny cottage. I don’t think she is truly happy, not in here.
” Emeline touched the center of her chest. “And more and more of late, she seems worn down.”
Louise slowly nodded. “I don’t think she has been the same since Tray was killed in a sudden landslip. That dog was her constant, loyal companion through all the long days of fossil hunting.” The corners of her mouth turned down.
“Oh, yes, it was the most terrible day, especially since Mary narrowly escaped being buried herself!” Emeline’s gaze held Louise’s.
“Have you ever considered that her closest companions were her dog Tray and her mother?” She let this sink in before adding quietly, “I think you and I deserve fuller lives.”
“What exactly do you mean? Have you changed your mind about men and marriage?”
Emeline gave a short laugh. “Not a bit! But together, we can chart a different, unconventional course.” Excitement infected her voice. “What if we take lodgings together, in London?”
Her cousin’s soup spoon was suspended in mid-air. “And how would we fund such an endeavor?”