Chapter 8
Chapter
Morning mist shrouded the field, a veil that coyly shifted and swirled around Lucy and me as we walked. Our breath caught frost in the air, and my skirts were heavy with dew. The mighty oak at the heart of the sheep pasture, shading clusters of ferns, was our destination.
The sea was south. Once the mist burned off, I would catch a glimpse—a strip of glittering blue caught between the curve of the hills.
I’d been at Lucy’s three days now, and it was the longest stretch of time I’d ever spent away from home.
These were the first three days of my life that I hadn’t walked the beach each morning hunting for fossils, and I was surprised how much I missed it.
This was pleasant enough, walking the farm with Lucy, Achilles, and the pterodactyl in tow, but I missed the gravel and sand under my boots, the smell of brine, and the silence of my own thoughts.
We reached the oak, and Lucy murmured to Achilles. He lifted from her arm and flew to the branches, looking down with a cocked head.
“Go on, then. You, too. Just like yesterday,” I said to the pterodactyl, and gently brushed him off my shoulder as I pulled out my notebook.
He hopped down to the grass, then lumbered toward the tree with his strange, four-footed walk.
I’d guessed that at some point, he would begin to walk like a bird, with wings folded against his back, but that turned out to be a faulty assumption. On land, the pterodactyl is quadrupedal, with all four limbs involved in walking, much like a bat, I’d written yesterday.
“Have you chosen a name yet?” Lucy asked.
I blushed. “I…was thinking of calling him Ajax.”
Lucy clapped. “Oh, because he’s cousin to Achilles!”
“I know it’s a little silly. The two obviously aren’t really related, but—”
“Well, why not?”
I frowned. “Because they’re distinct species,” I said after a moment. “Like the mammoth and the elephant. We know from comparing fossils and skeletons that they were similar, but not the same species.”
“I guess that makes sense.” Lucy shrugged, then shouted at Achilles to stop chasing a sparrow.
But I was still mulling over Lucy’s question. Why not? Without meaning to, she’d touched on the heart of all the most contentious geomagical debates of our time.
As I’d said, the mammoth and the elephant were the classic geomagical example of species differentiation. Buckland, the great defender of traditional geomagical theory, would say that they were distinct, separate creations, each perfectly formed by God.
Except that elephants appeared far, far later in the geomagical strata than the mammoth, long after mammoths vanished from it.
So where, exactly, had the mammoths gone? And the plesiosaur, or the ichthyosaur, or the pterodactyl, for that matter?
The Scriptures said, in Genesis: And God saw every thing that he had made, and, behold, it was very good.
Which posed a simple enough question: why would the Creator make the ancient beasts, only to destroy them later?
Buckland said that in the early days, when the Geomagical Society of London was first formed, the anathema word had been bandied about in whispered tones: extinction.
But that theory—and its threat to the Church—nearly unraveled our new science before it was even born.
It was Buckland, dedicated clergyman and geomagician both, whose infamous lecture upon his appointment at Oxford, Vindicae Geomagicae, or the Connexion between Geomagic and Religion Explained, brought about a tentative truce between Church and geomagical science.
I was only ten at the time, but I wish I’d been there to see it.
Buckland told me about it later: how the audience of Oxford dons and students and other clergy sat rapt as he declared that the Great Deluge, Noah’s flood, was responsible for the displacement of the ancients.
Not extinct at all, he argued, only flung and scattered far across the earth.
And so things stood, more or less, until Henry Stanton—damn him—published his own counter theory last summer.
Of course I read his book, Natural Disasters and the Magical Transmutation of Species. Wasn’t it possible, Henry posited, that the mammoth was actually an ancestor of the elephant, which had morphed or transmuted over the great stretch of time?
Henry went on to argue that catastrophic natural disasters initiated a magical process of transformation in surviving species, essentially turning them into new ones.
That would explain how species disappeared or emerged in the fossil record during roughly the same periods that we saw evidence of significant geomagical change.
Not only did Henry’s theory directly contradict Buckland’s Church-approved Noachianism, it toed dangerously close to true heresy. According to Church of England doctrine, magic was exclusively the province of humans—the result of the Fall of Man—and not an external force at all.
Henry had named his theory “Catastrophism,” which was unnecessarily dramatic.
Still, ever since I finished Natural Disasters and the Magical Transmutation of Species, I hadn’t been able to fully dismiss the idea. Not that I would ever admit such a thing to Buckland.
Ajax wasn’t an especially competent flier. So far, he was more comfortable launching himself from a height and then gliding to the ground.
I thought he might be able to launch himself skyward, eventually. He was still just a baby, after all. Time would tell.
Ajax climbed the trunk of the oak tree, claws hooking into the bark. He moved just as easily up the side of Lucy’s house, or the leg of her table, as he did the oak.
If I’d found only the skeleton, we would never know he was such a skilled climber. I certainly wouldn’t have guessed it from the claws.
The pterodactyl reached his perch overhead and settled, his wings flared like oversized shoulder blades.
Lucy was right about his intelligence. The pterodactyl adapts quickly to novel situations and challenges, demonstrating a surprising level of intelligence, similar to that of juvenile corvidae, I jotted down quickly.
I held up my arm, and Ajax came at my summons, his leathered wings sweeping wide. He launched up from the branch, then arched through the sky, and I felt the warmth in my chest as he flew to me. Good fellow.
Ajax landed lightly, and I fed him bits of chick from a pouch with my free hand.
I was surprised how much he preferred the poultry to fish, given his coastal habitat.
Lucy had loaned me a set of elbow-length leather gloves, which helped minimize the scratches.
Satisfaction curled around my heart with the trusting clutch of his claws.
Achilles, soaring above like a black shadow, cawed. Lucy’s head snapped up, her eyes narrowing. She flung out her arm, and Achilles dove to land.
“Someone’s coming up the hill.”
I hoped it was Buckland. But it could just as easily be a stranger. We quickly reviewed our cover story: Ajax was a stowaway bird, found on a ship from New South Wales that had recently docked in Brighton.
I could only hope that was believable enough to stave off the parson and pitchforks awhile.
I heard the horses first, the patter of hooves on the packed-earth road, and squinted to make out the two riders as they came into view, the horses’ legs swirling the mist like sea-foam.
“Mary, is that you?”
Sheer relief rolled down my spine at the familiar voice. My arm must have dropped a little, because Ajax squawked and poked at my ear.
“Yes! Yes, Buckland, it’s me!”
Relief turned to shock as I recognized the man riding beside him. A younger face than Buckland’s, and no hat on that head of thick, dark waves.
Shock turned to anger, and anger crystallized to fury. Even from the distance, I recognized those black curls and that wry smile—that damn, damned, damnable smile—as the stupidly handsome face of Henry Stanton.