Chapter 4
Chapter
It was only a sliver, but bone meant skeleton. A vertebrate this low in the Blue Lias was likely an ichthyosaur or plesiosaur. Well. Or a fish.
I tried not to let my hope dim; fish weren’t necessarily exciting, but a quality skeleton could pay the rent through to tourist season. And on the off chance it was something spectacular…
“I’m going to climb up. Take a closer look,” I said, tying my skirts into a knot above my knees. “Hold my hat.”
Lucy wrinkled her nose. “Are you sure it’s safe?”
I studied the sloping cliff, already destabilized from the earlier rockslide. I remembered my father’s face, drawn and white after his fall. No. I wasn’t sure. But I needed to see that bone.
“Why, Lucy Murray, I didn’t think you even knew the word,” I dodged the question, wiggling my foot into a foothold as I began the ascent.
Lucy gasped in mock offense, and I chuckled.
Once, that summer I was fifteen, Lucy declared that she wanted to climb to the top of the village clocktower.
Henry, Edgar, and I tried to talk her out of it.
She was only thirteen, younger than the three of us, but she couldn’t be deterred.
And with her witch magic, she couldn’t be stopped.
In the end, we stood at the base of the tower and watched her climb.
I was never so fearless. Even now my mouth was dry. But the need to see—to find, to know—overrode the fear.
“And besides,” I added, over my shoulder, “I know you’ll catch me if I fall.”
Thus assuaged, Lucy shouted out guidance, recommending outcropped holds for my fingers and feet.
My boots were old and worn; I hadn’t bought new ones in two years.
But their threadbare quality proved a boon now, my toes and the leather working together to provide a firm grip on the crumbly rock face.
My pulse beat faster in my aching fingertips. I shimmied to the right, toward the bone, and briefly pulled my hand from the wall to brush away the top layer of dirt.
It was an unfamiliar shape. Bowed, almost. And chipped at one end—enough that I could tell the interior was…
Hollow. My heart leapt in my chest.
I checked that my feet were solidly anchored and then pulled a chisel from my belt to pry some of the stone loose.
I’d spent plenty of time with bird skeletons—pigeons or seagulls I found dead and used beetles and boiling to pick clean—and I was reminded at once of those bones. But that made no sense. This geomagical strata was older than birds.
I had the sense that I was on the edge, on the verge, of learning something new.
My left foot slipped.
I gasped and flung my body into the rock. The chisel fell with a clatter as I clung to the wall.
“Mary!” Lucy exclaimed.
I inhaled, the cold salt air helping to ground me.
“I’m fine.” I exhaled. “I’m perfectly fine.”
“I really think you should come down now.” Her voice was thin and high. In all the years I’d known Lucy, I could count on one hand the times she’d expressed something close to caution. If Lucy thought this a bad idea, it probably was.
But I had to get that bone. I had to see if there were any others. I looked around, quickly assessing.
There was no time to build a scaffold. No time for a careful excavation. My reliq was full, but that wouldn’t be anywhere close to enough magic for such a large working.
I want to help, Lucy told me when we left the slicker, and I knew it was true. I didn’t want her money. But I would gladly use her magic.
“Actually, Luce,” I called down, over my shoulder, “do you think you could carve out a cave?” I met her eyes and raised a brow. “Now, we both know precision isn’t always your strength—”
“Oh, hush.” Lucy laughed, but her cheeks reddened, likely remembering last week when she’d tried to magically stoke the fire and nearly burned down her cottage. “Are you sure that won’t weaken the cliff?”
“It’ll be safer than continuing to dangle here like a monkey in petticoats. If you make a little tunnel, I can climb in and extract the rest of the bone. Just be sure not to cut down into this layer. See where the stone changes?” I tapped at the rock just above my head. “I’ll do that myself.”
“And shall I fetch you some tea while I’m at it?” But Lucy was smiling as she moved her hands.
With a grinding, crunching rumble, the stone above my brow began to swirl.
I squeezed my eyes shut as fine black dust fell across my nose and cheeks.
I tried not to think what other fossils might be caught in the vortex, crushed to nothing.
I opened one eye to peek as the hole deepened and darkened into a small, yawning mouth.
“Precise enough?” Lucy sniffed when she was done.
“Luce, you’re a marvel—”
My praise twisted to a scream as part of the wall to my right peeled itself from the cliff and tumbled, striking and splitting as it fell with a sound like cracking thunder.
“Run!” I shouted down to her, as more cracks pinged across the cliff. “Get back! Go!”
Something hard struck my eyebrow, and I looked up, terror in my throat. More small stones fell, shrapnel-sharp, over my shoulders and arms. The cliff was going to slide again.
Lucy shrieked, but I didn’t catch the words. I could only hope she’d run back toward the sea.
I heaved myself up into the cave mouth, tumbling into the darkness. I held my breath, counting the heartbeats in my ear—one, two, three—until the roar of the earth went still. Silence—horrible silence—stretched too long. Only crashing waves and howling wind.
“Mary! Mary!”
Oh, thank God. The cords of fear in my neck slackened, and my jaw unclenched.
I grunted as I tried to turn around. I have never been a dainty woman; my hips pressed at the sides of the cave, and the ceiling rock scraped painfully at my shoulder blades as I twisted back toward the opening. Perhaps I should have been more specific about the required cave dimensions.
I poked out my head. “Luce! I’m alive!”
She burst into relieved tears. “Right—well—you come down from there at once, Mary Anning, or God help me I’ll bring the whole cliff down on purpose this time!”
“In a minute,” I said, starting to scoot backward on hands and knees. “I’m going to take a look around first.”
She called me several awful names in response as I wiggled myself around again to properly study my surroundings.
I’d expected the cave to be shallow, but the tunnel stretched deep into the darkness of the cliff itself.
I cursed my lack of a lantern and pulled the ammonite reliq from my blouse. Light, I willed it, and the reliq began to glow, bouncing like a little star on my chest.
The light was dim, but my eyes adjusted, even as I crawled farther into the dark.
I’d only traveled a few feet when my fingers touched something, and I knew at once by the texture it was bone.
I worked furiously with a chisel and brush, hands shaking. Embedded in the stone were more fossilized bones like the one under the lip of the cliff: brown, long, thin, and hollow.
I wished again for a better light. And a notebook. But as I had neither, I did my best to memorize the exact layout: the bisecting spine, the skull, the triangular arch of the wings—for now I was sure they were wings.
I cleared the last of the dust and gravel, and the whole shape of it lay before me in the stone.
My skin pricked with goosebumps. I had read accounts of flying creatures out of Germany, but none had ever been found in England. Yet the sketches had looked like this. Pterodactyl, they called the creatures, kin to both bird and lizard.
There was an odd thing, though. An oval shape near what I guessed to be the creature’s foot. I hadn’t seen anything like that in the German sketches.
It took me a moment to make sense of what I was seeing, because it was so unexpected. I pulled the smallest chisel from my belt pouch and began to loosen the rock, careful not to disturb the main skeleton. The stone came free easily, gray and cool to my touch.
It was—somehow, remarkably, incredibly—an egg, which fit perfectly between my two cupped palms.
This alone was a second miracle find. Most geomagicians agreed that the ancient beasts likely laid eggs like birds or reptiles, but there was flimsy evidence. This was clear, though. An egg. Whole, and unbroken. Perfect.
I twisted to sit, hunched and cross-legged, and cradled the egg, staring with naked delight. It hardly seemed possible. Shouldn’t be possible.
The pterodactyl was female. She’d died, here, with her clutch of eggs. Now that I knew what I was seeing, I recognized the rounded remnants of the other eggs.
I pictured the mother crouched over a nest, her wings spread protectively as she died. Her neck bent, her eyes closed.
Had she made her nest in a cave much like this? Had the mud or water risen to fill it? Or maybe she died in a landslide, like the one I’d just survived? Whatever killed her, the mother had died protecting her young. Protecting this egg.
I knew better than to assign such a creature human motives. But my thumbs nevertheless ran across the stone surface of the fossilized shell, an awe thrumming through me. The egg felt almost warm in my hands.
It twitched.
I cursed and dropped it, then cursed again as I failed to catch it. Thankfully the egg landed on the soft pillow of bundled skirts around my legs.
I touched it tentatively. And it gave way to my finger. I’d imagined that, right? Surely I’d imagined it.
A small spiderweb crack had appeared near the top. I picked it up again. A queasy feeling roiled in my stomach, because the egg was now soft and pliable, like a snake’s. And the color was no longer smooth gray, but mottled cream and brown.
And it was this realization that finally made me exclaim, in a breathless rush, “Oh. Oh my. It’s about to hatch.”