Chapter 2
Chapter
After you survive a lightning strike, everyone will say you were saved for a reason. Why else would God have stayed His hand? The burden of those expectations—of greatness, of brilliance, of success—is a heavy weight to bear.
I know this from experience.
Just before my father died, he called me to his bed. I could hardly see his face through my tears. His cheeks were sunken, and his hand was boned and paled like an old man’s.
“My little Mary,” Father said to me, with the rasp of death already in his throat. “God Himself has blessed you. You are bound for great things, my girl. Great, great things.”
I wished it were a fluke of fate instead. An accident of chance. Easier that than to believe I’d been chosen by God, and to know that I had failed.
On the day of the storm, my mother was having one of her spells. What if she had been well? The neighbor girl, Elizabeth, offered to watch me. What if she hadn’t? When the rain rolled in, heavy clouds and rumbling thunder, Elizabeth took shelter under an elm. What if she’d chosen the oak instead?
I imagine, sometimes, how Elizabeth would’ve held me close. I was scarcely one year old; small and sickly, I’ve been told. I might have trembled. Might have cried. Maybe she whispered into my ear, softly. It’s only a storm. It will be all right.
I wish, sometimes, that I could remember it. Usually I’m glad I can’t.
When the lightning came, the current ripped through the trunk. Elizabeth died instantly, along with two others.
I was the only survivor under the elm.
I carry that with me. How could I not? I lived, and they died. I had to be great, for them. From my earliest memories, I knew I was meant to mark this world, this earth, this life, because those three women never had the chance.
Which is why every failure burned; every bill and debt and back-owed rent and walk to the slicks when there was nothing left. God Himself has blessed you, and this is the best you can do with it?
I slumped at my desk, head in my hands.
The letter from Buckland was already worn soft from rereading, but I picked it up again, now skimming to the final blow.
…these things take time, Mary. There are delicate questions at play, and difficult to address quickly…
The questions weren’t delicate. Only my sex was. I was a woman. According to the Geomagical Society’s Charter, candidates had to be proposed by an existing member, and no woman had ever even been nominated, let alone elected by majority vote.
I didn’t resent that truth. What I resented was that Buckland wouldn’t even try. Why not put my name forth, explain my accomplishments, and see how the votes fell out?
Well, I knew why: the current Society president had announced plans to step down at the annual meeting in June, and Buckland—currently vice president—was actively campaigning to replace him. Which meant Buckland was even more concerned about his reputation than usual.
There were a few other geomagicians to whom I often sold fossils. But no one I knew well enough to ask for nomination. Buckland was my only hope.
It is my sincerest hope that we will see you named a geomagician within the decade, he wrote. I know this will be a disappointment, but I can only urge you to give the matter time.
Except I didn’t have time to give. Besides the rent I owed for my shop and the flat upstairs, my Aunt Patricia had written three times this month, begging funds to pay for Mother’s medical care. My purse was dry.
Even before Father’s death, we were poor, and after came grim, lean years of grief, where only the slicks and Parish charity kept us fed.
Mother was useless, but my skill with fossils had been our salvation.
With Buckland’s help and connections, I made a name for myself.
Collectors, geomagicians, and artisanal reliq-makers all flocked to Lyme Regis to buy the things I unearthed.
For a few years, I thought I was finally free.
Safe. That’s when I signed the lease for the shop and the flat above.
Oh, I’d been a fool. I could only sell what the earth and sea unveiled, and I’d made no more great discoveries—the kind that could fill my coffers—in years.
But Society members received an annuity. It was a modest salary, but more than I’d ever dreamed in my life. I thought I might be able to plead a bit more time from my landlord if I knew I would be named a geomagician in three months, with the income to match.
And I deserved it. Buckland knew that, too.
It wasn’t arrogance to call myself the most accomplished fossilist in England, and possibly the whole of Europe: I’d uncovered nearly all the best ichthyosaur and plesiosaur specimens.
Apparently, one of my plesiosaur skeletons was even displayed in the atrium of the Geomagical Society’s Palmanaeus House.
So, I had gathered all my courage, set aside my pride, and written the letter. I had asked him, point-blank, to put my name forward in nomination at the annual meeting.
I’d tried not to let my desperation show, but I now feared it had seeped onto the page with the ink.
There was only one option left. The one option always available to those of us desperate and poor enough to take it.
It’s a terrible thing, to sell one’s magic. To take a bit of yourself, a piece of your very soul, and hand it over for coin.
But as long as there has been magic—or as long as there have been reliquaries, I suppose—magic has been bought and sold. Bought by the richest; sold by the poorest.
Because what use was a little magic—only enough for fire-starting or scrape-healing, if you managed to store enough—when a little coin could buy bread? No reliq could hold enough magic to build a shelter or summon a meal. Not even a fossil.
I touched the reliq hanging round my own neck. A delicate, perfect ammonite—yes; I might be a plain and unfashionable one, but I was still a woman, and ammonites are lovely—strung on a leather thong.
I didn’t use much magic, day to day. Once in a while, I might tap a reliq to dust the top of the cabinets, or sharpen my knives, but mostly I held my magic in reserve, too scarred by those dark years.
I’d last tapped my reliquary six weeks ago, mending my boots when the sole fell off and I couldn’t afford the cobbler’s fee.
And a good thing, too, because that meant the reliq around my neck was full again.
I’d get a decent price for it in the slicks.
My stomach was sour, my mouth dry. I could already hear Lucy’s tutting disapproval about how “participation grants legitimacy,” or something similarly idealistic pulled straight from her Promethean pamphlets.
But I wasn’t the daughter of a viscount, even a disinherited one like Lucy Murray, witch of Lyme Regis.
If Lucy were ever on the verge of eviction and skipping meals to save the coin, she could just write to her brother, Edgar, and ask for a loan.
Yes, yes, fine, I could, too. We’d all been dear friends, once, that summer I was fifteen. That brightest year of my life, now half a lifetime past. But I could never ask Edgar for money. Just as I would never ask Lucy.
She’d insisted, once, and I wallowed in shame for weeks, trying to repay her. Eventually I wrote to a Swiss geomagician and agreed to sell the precious collection of ichthyosaur eye-rings he wanted.
I had hoped to write my first real, scholarly paper about those eye-rings.
Most geomagicians assumed the ichthyosaur would have hunted in shallows, or near the surface, like the crocodile and dolphin it resembled.
But from my analysis of the sclerotic rings of their eyes—like a bony, cored round of pineapple—I suspected the creatures were actually deep-water hunters.
The Swiss geomagician came to the same conclusion. His paper, On the Optical Structures of the Ichthyosaur and Its Hunting Patterns, was published the following year. Buckland sent me a translated copy.
I should have just gone to the slicks. It might be terrible, but it was honest. And the shame, at least, was private.
My shop was on the main promenade, behind the seawall.
On stormy days I could see the waves crashing, white froth and spray, and on pleasant ones I watched couples with parasols walking along the sand.
Today the sky was ominous, bruised with roiling clouds, and the street out front was nearly empty.
If I was going to go, I might as well get on with it. Storm be damned.
I carefully wiped and stored my tools, then tidied the display counters a bit, dawdling while I arranged a tray of shining belemnites.
I tucked the paper I was reading, Observations on the Dietary Habits of the Marine ‘Plesiosaurus’ by Archibald Taylor, into my satchel.
It was one of my plesiosaurs Mr. Taylor had observed, and it would cheer me up to add my own annotated corrections.
I put on my black top hat and quilted coat, then locked up the shop. I’d come back afterward to grab my supplies for an evening hunt.
I had to hold my hat as the wind tried to snatch it, sputtering and spitting the loose strands of hair that whipped into my mouth. My tongue tasted iron, and gooseflesh rose on my arms. There was a sensation of the air pulled taut.
Lightning.
I squared my shoulders and set off toward Broad Street. I was never afraid of lightning.
Lyme Regis sloped to the sea, the main road splitting the town.
Off this trunk branched lanes and alleyways, some with houses or flats, others with shops, like Butcher’s Row and Baker’s Alley.
The rich of Lyme Regis, and the businesses they frequented, clustered here in the upper western quarter off the main road.
A view of the sea but little risk of flooding.
That’s where Edgar and Lucy stayed, the summer they spent in Lyme Regis.
And Henry’s mother still lived nearby, actually, in that very whitewashed house with a turret, next to a haberdasher. Reliq-lamps glowed in the window, illuminating the grand, empty library.