Chapter 15
Chapter
On the beach, on the last day, sixteen-year-old Henry rolled his eyes and said, “I am trying to tell you that I love you.”
The waves themselves went quiet to hear the pounding of my heart. His thumb brushed over my cheekbone, the line to my parted lips.
I loved him, too.
Of course I did. I’d loved Henry Stanton from the first moment, when he knelt beside me in the sand to dig free an ichthyosaur skull and share my giddy joy at the long teeth and spiraled eye.
I’d loved him for the way he walked beside me on slick rock, letting me catch his arm and catching mine in turn when we slipped.
I loved the frown between his eyes when he chipped at a fossil.
I loved the heat in his voice when we read a scientific paper and he encountered an argument he didn’t think well made.
I loved that he teased, but never about my mother.
I loved that he snuck extra sugar into Lucy’s tea.
I loved that he told Edgar when he was being obnoxious.
I loved the way he hummed to himself when walking. I loved him.
I loved him. And I had never imagined Henry Stanton would love me, too.
And I was afraid of it. Didn’t trust it. Dreams like this didn’t just come true. Not without a cost.
But when Henry ran a thumb down my cheek and curled his fingers into my hair and confessed that he loved me, I didn’t care.
Later, when the letters stopped, I would look back on that moment and see that I was wise to fear. I should have listened to that instinct.
“I love you, too, Henry,” I said, and relief turned his face boyish and bright. “I love you, I love you, I love you,” I cried.
Henry laughed, and then pressed his lips against mine.
We fumbled a moment—hands and mouths finding a rhythm—and then sank into the sweet heat of it.
My chest fluttered and my limbs tingled, and I kissed Henry Stanton with all the hunger of longing, of nights where I’d lain awake, imagining exactly this.
He kissed my neck. He cupped my head and pulled me close. He brushed a palm over my breast, and I caught my breath.
“Mary,” he breathed, and groaned into my ear, burying his face in my neck, his hands groping for my skirts.
I was willing. There’s no point pretending otherwise.
But then Henry pulled back with a shudder, his hands on my elbows, holding me away.
“We shouldn’t.” He shook his head. “Not until we are married.”
I didn’t mean to laugh, but I couldn’t help it. Henry looked shocked and hurt, so I tried to stifle it quickly, but the damage was done. He released my arms as if I’d burned him.
“Do you—would you not wish to marry me?”
“Oh, Henry,” I said softly, “of course I want to marry you.”
But we were too different. I knew what I was. Henry’s family was kind to me, but that was as an eccentric companion for their son. They would never want me for Henry’s bride.
I was plain and poor, ill-mannered and odd. His mother must simply have trusted that Henry would never see me as a potential object of desire, or she never would have let us spend so much time together.
And even then, part of me wondered if Henry understood what else it would mean to love me. What it would mean to his future. To his own prospects. To his dreams.
Henry had inherited his father’s fortune, but to climb—to really climb, to the heights he dreamed—he would need a suitable wife at his side. Not a half-literate wild-child with no name or dowry to speak of.
I loved him. I did. But even then, my joy was shadowed by doubt.
I tried to explain this to Henry. I tried to tell him. But he grinned madly.
“Since when have you ever cared what others have to say?”
“But Henry—”
He took my hands. “Listen to me, Mary. Please.”
God help me, I listened.
“I’m leaving Lyme Regis. Tomorrow. I’m going back to school with Edgar. His father’s got me a place.”
My heart fell out of my chest.
“That’s why I had to tell you today. Even if you didn’t love me back, I needed you to know, or—or I would have regretted it forever.”
Henry was leaving Lyme Regis. I’d known it would come, eventually; his time here was always borrowed. But it was so much sooner than I’d imagined.
“But now? Now that we both know how the other feels?” He laughed happily. “I hardly mind leaving at all.”
“Oh, good,” I said sarcastically.
“Don’t you see? This is just a step toward our future. A brief moment where we are parted, and then a lifetime to share. Ed has some grand ideas, Mary—you know how he is. This way, I can help him. Which will help us.
“In two years, I will go on to university. I plan to study geomagic, of course, with Professor Buckland. And we will wed, then, Mary, and you can come with me. As my wife. As a woman, you won’t be allowed at lectures, but I can share my notes with you, and my books, and we can work together.
And then when I am done with university, I’ll join the Geomagical Society. Buckland will nominate me, surely.
“You know I have plenty of money, Mary. We can travel the continent. Travel the world! All while hunting fossils. Think of what we can do! Together.”
The vision was intoxicating. A future of fossils, and freedom, and Henry. I would be the wife of a geomagician. It was more than I’d ever dreamed for myself, and once it was laid out before me, I couldn’t imagine any other life.
“What do you say? Be my wife, my love. Marry me, Mary.”
And he smiled so earnestly that I took his offered hand and said, Yes.
An odd expression flickered across Henry’s face as he watched mine. That furrowed brow and twisted lip would shatter all my hard-won dignity.
Was it pity? I could take his contempt. I was accustomed to contempt. Pity, though? Pity would unravel me.
But Henry was still talking. “I mean it, Mary. I’ve followed your career, you know. Studied your finds.”
“I know,” I said. “I’ve read your papers.”
He raised an eyebrow. “You have?”
“I read all the papers.”
He nodded. A muscle moved in his jaw. “I thought of writing. But I assumed you wouldn’t want to hear from me. Not after…”
I laughed, lightly—at least, God, I hoped it was light. “After what?”
Henry frowned. “After how we left things…between us.” He swallowed, his mouth twisting uncertainly. I had him off-balance. Good.
“Oh, you mean all that?” I waved dismissively. “I haven’t thought about it in years. I had almost forgotten, really.”
As if I could have forgotten. As if he hadn’t left me shattered. As if he hadn’t broken my heart.
We parted, that day, on the stairs to his stepfather’s house, this secret engagement a golden chain between us.
“Goodbye for now, Henry,” I said, and smiled with a meaningful look. I was already imagining his ring on my finger. The veil on my hair.
“Goodbye, Mary.” He grinned back. Then he turned to go inside, and took my heart and my hope with him.
How young we both were.
The letters came steadily for a few months. I tore them open and pressed them to my breast, imagining I could smell Henry on the page or touch him through the ink.
Then the time between letters began to stretch, longer and longer, and the words of love and longing were slowly replaced by short sentences about his days at school.
I wasn’t a fool. I sensed the shift. And I whispered into my own letters, before I sealed the envelopes, my own kind of magic: I love you, I love you, I love you. Love me, love me, love me.
And then one day I counted the months and realized it had been seven since he’d written back. I waited one more, to be sure.
I wrote to Edgar then. He, at least, still answered my letters. Please. Please—has Henry forgotten me? I begged.
I am sorry to say I do suspect so, Edgar wrote back from school, and I could read the sorrow in between the lines. Henry has a great deal of ambition, and little patience for anything that may hinder his climb.
That was two years after Henry vowed his love and life to me on the beach. He would be off to university soon. And whatever he’d said that day, whatever he’d promised, I suppose I’d always suspected the truth.
I knew it was over. I gathered all the letters, and I brought them to the rocks by the sea, and I lit a candle and fed them one by one to the flame and scattered the ashes in the white surf.
Henry never wrote again.
Here, now, in the dim hold of the ship, a grown Henry ran a hand through his hair. There were scattered gray strands in it now, and more lines around his eyes. But he was still the same man who’d broken his promise.
“Oh,” he said, his brows drawing together. “Well. That’s good, then.”
“We were just children. I never really believed you wanted…what you said you wanted.”
I couldn’t even say it aloud. Marriage. A life together. A life with me. Because of course I had believed him.
I bent to pick up Ajax so that Henry couldn’t see my face. He chomped happily at the beetle in his beak as I carried him back to the crate.
Ajax made a small sound of protest but settled quickly. I closed the crate lid and turned back to Henry.
“You know”—his Adam’s apple bobbed in a swallow—“when I agreed to accompany the professor, I thought that now, after all this time—I hoped perhaps we could be friends.”
Maybe if I were a more forgiving woman, it would have been possible. But I had nursed this grudge from the cradle on my tears, and I wasn’t about to send it to the grave now.
“I believe trust is a required condition for friendship,” I said sharply. “I said I had almost forgotten the whole thing. That doesn’t mean I forgive it. I have no need of your friendship, Mr. Stanton.”
“Ah. I think you will find you do, Miss Anning. The Society is…” He drummed his fingers on one of the barrels. An annoyed huff came from Ajax’s crate, and Henry ceased his tapping. “Traditional. You will need more allies than Buckland.”
“Is that a threat?”
“No, Mary.” He gave a half smile, mockery or pity or both, I couldn’t tell. “It’s an offer.”