Chapter 9
Chapter
My heart pounded with every step Henry’s horse took.
Lucy clutched my arm. “Is that…?”
“Yes. It’s him.” My mouth was dry, the words hoarse.
“He got so tall.”
My teeth ground together, and my fists clenched. How dare he? How dare Henry come back here? He had no right. No right at all.
Lyme Regis was my home. Not his. Not anymore. And Ajax was my find. My triumph. So of course, here was Henry Stanton, to spoil it all.
The pair reined in their horses and dismounted, crossing to us in a few strides. Both wore dusty breeches, riding coats, and tall, fine boots. I scowled, but neither noticed.
William Buckland—round-faced, with laughing wrinkles at the corners of his eyes and thick, caterpillar brows—stumbled forward and threw his hands to his chest, above his heart.
His mouth worked a moment, without any sound. It was the first time I’d ever seen the great William Buckland speechless.
I pointedly refused to look at Henry, but I could sense him standing perfectly still. Observing. He probably wore the same smug expression he had as a boy, explaining that “verteberries” were really “vertebrae.”
Ajax shifted, pressing the side of his head against my cheek.
I had a living pterodactyl on my shoulder. Even Henry Stanton couldn’t ruin this for me.
The animal’s movement finally drew Buckland’s eyes to mine. “It’s real,” he breathed. “It’s alive. God in Heaven. It’s alive.”
“Yes. Isn’t that what I said in my letter?”
Buckland laughed. “So it is.”
Henry stepped forward, and my head swung toward him, despite my best efforts. Something flickered over his face—shame, I hoped—but he hid it quickly.
Lucy was right; he was tall. Henry had been a nice-looking boy, but he’d become an alarmingly handsome man.
He’d grown into his broad nose and strong chin, and his posture had improved significantly since our childhood.
And from the tilted smirk on his mouth, I had the impression he knew what a striking impression he made, even in the brown traveling coat and leather boots.
“It’s good to see you, Mary,” he said quietly, then cleared his throat.
Our eyes locked, and the weight of the memories pulled me under like the tide. Because the last time I looked into those dark gray eyes, like the sky before a storm, I was fifteen years old—on the cusp of sixteen—and God, I had loved him.
I first met Henry on the beach, below the cliffs. I was kneeling on flooded stone, trying to chisel out an ichthyosaur jaw, when a skinny boy walked up and peered over my shoulder.
I glared back at him, squinting in the sun. The boy was lanky, with eyes too big for his face. “Can I help you?”
“Actually, I was hoping that I could help you.” And he knelt beside me, and cold water soaked the knees of his breeches.
We spent every day together after that. For a full year, until we met the Murrays, it was just us two. Henry was my first friend. I think I would have loved him for that alone.
That year, I taught him all my father had taught me: how to walk carefully over wet stone, with a wide, bent-legged stance and heavy steps.
I taught him the best time to search the cliffs—after a storm, when the winds and rain would flay and strip the rock to unveil new layers and bone.
How to read the clouds for signs of such a storm on the horizon.
How to clean and prepare the fossils we found.
We were like two wanderers cast back through time, into a world before mankind.
I was happy for the first time since Father died.
Henry’s family was wealthy, but new-moneyed. His late father had been an industrialist whose textile factories earned a fortune with the adoption of the power-loom. He was introduced to Edgar almost as soon as the Murrays arrived in Lyme Regis the next June.
I’m sure Henry’s mother hoped he would spend his time with the future viscount rather than the pauper fossil girl. Instead, Henry brought us all together. We were no longer a pair, Henry and me, but I didn’t mind. I’d thought one friend was a gift. Three was a bounty I’d never dreamed.
Lucy was wild, her rosy cheeks still plump with childhood, her mouth always curved in some mischief. She liked to clamber over the rocks with Henry and me, though she didn’t care for the fossil hunting itself. She annoyed and delighted me in equal measure, the sister I’d always hoped for.
Edgar had the same restless spirit. He could never sit still, and he spoke too quickly, switching topics so rapidly that he often tripped over the words. But—perhaps to survive his father’s fist—he’d learned to channel that energy more strategically than his sister.
When she wanted to escape their governess, Lucy climbed onto the roof.
Edgar, though, would claim he wanted to practice his Latin and settle the old woman in the plush armchair by the window—so the warm sun shone on her cheek—and read from Tacitus until she fell fast asleep.
That usually bought the Murray siblings a few hours.
Edgar didn’t care for fossil hunting, and Lucy was more a liability than help. So Henry and I spent less time on the beach that summer, and more time in his family library.
I’d showed Henry the how of fossils—where to find them, how to clean them—but eventually he wanted the what, and why. What were these creatures, these shapes we were finding in the cliffs? Why were they there? What did they mean?
I’d asked these questions, too. Only I had no way of finding answers except in conversation with Buckland. There were few books in Lyme Regis, fewer on geomagic—the science itself lacking even a name back then—and none at all available to a poor girl of low birth like me.
Nothing was barred to Henry and Edgar, though.
Henry’s stepfather kindly wrote to friends on Henry’s behalf, and to members of the Royal Magical Society.
Edgar, as a favor to us, wrote to the curator of the British Museum itself.
And when Buckland next came to town, I eagerly introduced him to my new friends.
Henry would go on to study with Buckland at Oxford, years later.
But back then, the study of geomagic was being birthed, and soon we were inundated with books and articles and even correspondence with some of the leading fossil collectors. All addressed to the boys, of course.
I’d never been to school. I could read, and write neatly, and draw a little. The truth was, I’d thought myself quite clever—certainly cleverer than the wealthy girls in town, trapped forever indoors with dull tutors and boring lessons while I learned by the sea, under the open sky.
I was Henry’s teacher out there, but inside the sitting room of his stepfather’s house, reading by reliq-lamp, the others had to guide me. My education was as patchwork as my skirts, and here it showed its seams, even as I tried desperately to hide them.
Henry, Edgar, and even Lucy all spoke elegant French. The boys read Greek and Latin, and knew the work of poets, writers, and scientists of whom I’d never heard.
At least I knew my Bible; Father read me scripture nightly before he died. Still, I could only half follow when discussions turned to theomagical matters.
“What Pierce argues here can’t possibly be correct,” Edgar might say, raising his index finger. “The King James translates this word as enchantments, but it would be more accurate to translate the Hebrew as secret arts.”
“Someone should alert the archbishop,” Lucy would tease, probably swinging her legs as she did. “Tell him to put seventeen-year-old Edgar Murray in charge of a new biblical translation.”
That would make Edgar lift his chin. “Perhaps he should; mine would certainly be less…florid.”
“You’ll have to master your Greek verb tenses first,” Henry might chuckle, and Edgar’s face would sour.
“So sorcery, then?” Henry would ask, oblivious to Edgar’s annoyance. “If we assume Moses’s staff to be a reliq, and the scripture takes care to note that Pharoah’s magicians are performing something different, then it must be sorcery, right?”
“Yes. That’s the conventional interpretation.” Edgar would frown. “But if I am right, then what if there is some other magic—this secret art—that the magicians can access?”
“What do you think, Mary?” Henry always asked, but I rarely had a clever answer.
“I—I think it’s an interesting thought experiment,” I would mumble.
Henry sometimes frowned; then a wrinkle between his brows, and fear would glaze my eyes. Was he testing me? Or mocking me? Or was he oblivious? I could never be sure, and I think that doubt was the first sign of some chasm forming between us.
Henry and I were alone on the beach that day, the last day, wet and laughing and covered in sand. Edgar and Lucy were trapped at home with their governess, and Henry and I had collected a pile of limestone nodules to crack open once the Murrays were released from their French lessons.
Henry stood, dusting palms against his thighs. I looked up from the limestone I’d been brushing. Henry had changed over his two years in Lyme Regis. He was sixteen now, and his shoulders and calves were muscled from our climbs.
“I must tell you something, Mary.”
“Eh? What is it?”
Henry stood with his back to the sun, and I had to squint and shade my eyes.
“Wait, move that way a bit first. You’re right in the sun.”
Henry laughed and pulled me to my feet. I started to tease, but cut off as he gripped my hands tighter instead of letting them go.
Henry had never touched me like this, had never looked at me like this.
I’d seen that expression on his face—hard and focused, his lip twisted and caught between his front teeth—but it was usually directed at a particularly interesting puzzle he was keen to solve.
Now that look was directed at me. As if I were the most fascinating fossil in the world. My knees started to tremble, and my heart pounded into my ribs. I was afraid to move, in case I broke whatever spell it was that was making Henry Stanton stare at me like that.
But I was even more afraid that what he was about to say would break my heart. It would be something banal and devastating like, I’m hungry, let’s go back for lunch, or Do you see that ugly seagull over there?
Only he was still looking at me, and I knew I needed to strangle this hope before it bloomed any further.
“Mary.” Henry stepped closer. So much closer. I was afraid to meet those eyes. I looked past him, down the beach.
“You know, we should walk down to Charmouth. The innkeeper said he would put out some of my finds for his customers and—”
“Mary.”
“And it’s such a lovely day. I do love a blue sky, don’t you? Of course you do. Everyone does. Silly thing to say. No one prefers a gray sky to blue, except perhaps you and me, because it means a storm, and fossils.”
“Would you stop?”
Henry’s thumb brushed my cheek, and all the breath left my lungs. I finally looked up, frozen by shock.
“I am trying,” he said, and rolled his eyes, “to tell you that I love you.”