Chapter 17
Chapter
Edgar sent a coach for Lucy soon after, and she bounded down the front steps with a perfunctory wave. “I’ll see you tonight!” she called over her shoulder. “It will be wonderful, I just know it!”
Catherine was subtle about it, but it was obvious Elizabeth had been charged with attending me in Lucy’s absence.
“I don’t need a nursemaid,” I protested, as the girl led me through the narrow back entryway and into the first-floor parlor.
“I’m only showing you to your room.” Elizabeth smiled primly.
The house’s walls were papered in green and gold and lined with warm reliq-lamps.
Marble busts of scowling men and porcelain vases perched on pedestals, and a large oil painting hung above the piano.
But this was William Buckland’s home, after all, so the painting was of the animals entering Noah’s Ark, and skeletons and fossils—neatly labeled with species and date of discovery—filled the alcoves and topped the tables.
“How does your father afford all this?” I murmured, gently poking a small marble statue of a snake.
Elizabeth flinched.
I had known Buckland wasn’t poor. He was an Oxford don and church minister, and drew salaries from both. Plus he earned small profits from his books and the occasional well-attended public lecture.
But whenever I pictured Buckland at work in his study, I imagined him at a cramped desk in the corner, Catherine in a chair on the other side of the room at work on an illustration.
Obviously, in retrospect, I should have known the Bucklands were wealthy. After all, the family kept two houses, with staff, one in Oxford and this one in London.
“I didn’t mean to be rude,” I said, cursing my tongue and leaving the snake statue alone. Apparently I did need a nursemaid. “I only mean your father has been so kind to me, I suppose I imagined his station must not be too dissimilar from mine.”
Elizabeth’s face softened. “It’s all right. My grandfather was a farmer, you know.”
I was genuinely surprised. “I didn’t. I thought Buckland’s father was a metallumagician?”
We were flanked by more paintings in the hallway, one of a blue-and-white plesiosaur breaking the waves.
“No.” She looked at me sideways, like she was surprised I didn’t know this. “Grandfather knew the work of a metallumagician, but he never earned the title. ‘His schoolroom was the field and fen,’ Father likes to say.” It was a good impression.
“But Grandfather taught himself to locate metal deposits. He hired himself out to the mining investors, at a lower price than a metallumagician. Then he invested back into the mining companies.” She reddened. “That’s why we’re—well, as you said—I mean—”
“Wealthy.”
“Yes.” Her cheeks were shining apples. Her eyes flicked to mine and then away. “Father says you remind him of Grandfather. How you came from nothing, but earned a reputation for yourself nonetheless.”
Then she darted forward, and I followed stiffly. I heard no obvious mockery in Elizabeth’s tone, but her words—from nothing—hung in the air and left me uncertain.
I nearly laughed aloud as we passed the open door to what was obviously Buckland’s real study.
The lower half of each wall was glass display cases, filled with curiosities, and above these were shelves of books, all the way to the wood-beamed ceiling.
A ladder tracked around all four walls to reach the tallest shelves.
No cramped corner workstation here. The desk was like a ship, at sea among piles of papers and stacks upon stacks of worn books.
On the other side of the desk, opposite the chair, stood a freestanding case, the upper half of glass and gold. Inside, resting on purple velvet, was a foot-long lower jawbone.
I paused in the doorframe. “Megalosaurus.”
“You can tell that from here?” Elizabeth peered around me.
“Yes.” I’d known immediately, from the size and shape of the bone. “I recognize it from drawings. But I’ve also heard your father go on and on about that thing for enough years, I’d probably know it from a hundred meters.”
I remembered when Buckland first bought a few enormous fossilized teeth off a trader in Stonesfield, back in 1815.
He’d spent years trying to identify the species, comparing it to every living creature and dead.
They were lizard-like in structure, but too large for any known reptile; such a creature would have to be at least twelve meters in length.
The way he’d told the story, half the Society members jeered when he presented the hypothesis. Certainly the teeth were large, yes, but no lizard could grow that long, they said. It would collapse under its own weight. And where was his evidence, besides a bag of loose teeth?
Buckland and his friend William Conybeare came to Lyme Regis just after that failure of a meeting. We’d drunk together in The Three Crowns, and Buckland complained bitterly that he’d ruined his chance of discovering something truly new.
“Take it from a fossil hunter,” I’d said, “there are always more bones. And if you don’t find them, someone else will, and they will steal your discovery.”
After that, Buckland bought every fossil out of Stonesfield that he could get his hands on.
Then came the jawbone—this jawbone—and five years ago, in 1824, Buckland presented to the Society the jaw, a piece of pelvis, a thigh bone, and several vertebrae the size of two men’s fists on top of each other. Megalosaurus, he called it, and the applause was thunder.
In the letter he wrote to me after, Buckland called it his greatest triumph. I owe you my deepest thanks, Mary, for I was lost and doubting and you gave me hope.
I’d wept when I read those words. At the kindness in them. At the envy I felt, for the applause I would never hear.
“It’s your father’s proudest accomplishment,” I murmured.
“Until now,” Elizabeth said quietly. “Your pterodactyl will make him president, he says.”
The tangle that left in me—of pride and jealousy, again—was too familiar.
“He still wants it, then? The presidency?” I was certain that he did, but I was curious what she would say. Curious what she knew of the matter.
“Desperately,” Elizabeth said, as we climbed the stairs. “Davies is retiring this summer, finally, and Father says this is his last chance, before he’s too old.”
She pointed out the other rooms on this level: hers, Jane’s, and then mine and Lucy’s. The bath had already been drawn inside, the water steaming. My feet throbbed in anticipation.
The bed was four-poster, spread with a pink, rose-patterned quilt. The walls were painted butter yellow, and the wardrobe was nearly as wide as the bed frame. Bundles of dried lavender lay beside the pitcher and water bowl and across the pillow.
“I do hope Father wins. He has so many ideas for how to improve the Society.” Elizabeth sighed. “Of course, you know that best of all.”
Blythe barreled up the stairs and pitched into the room, followed by a laughing Jane and Catherine.
“Did you choose one already?” Blythe asked.
“Not yet,” said Elizabeth. “I thought she’d want to bathe first.”
“Choose what? And where’s Ajax?” I said anxiously.
“Safe, I promise,” Catherine said, and pulled aside a curtain so I could see into the back garden. Ajax was in a small, penned arena, poking around for bugs, I assumed. A knot between my shoulder blades unloosened.
“Choose one of the dresses!” Blythe squealed, prancing to the wardrobe and flinging open the door.
A rainbow of soft color hung in the wardrobe, in fine silk and cotton, lace trim and satin, embroidered flowers and puffed sleeves.
My hands itched to touch them—to run my fingertips down the skirts and over the collars, just to feel the stitches, but I didn’t want to get my dirt on the fine fabric.
I laughed. “Are you suggesting that perhaps I should not wear this to the Society this evening?”
I gestured over my body, at the mud-stained, mostly shapeless brown frock and the wrinkled floral kerchief that were my usual fossil-hunting uniform.
“You can’t wear that,” Blythe screeched. “It’s wretched!”
“Blythe!” Jane and Elizabeth both gasped.
Catherine, thankfully, knew me well enough to laugh.
But still I stared, a moment too long. I had never worn a dress so fine as even the plainest in the wardrobe. Not once in my whole life.
I gave up dreaming of dresses like these a long time ago, when I put away fantasies of young bridehood and beauty. From the ache in my chest now, I knew they were only sleeping, never dead. But I was old now—nearly thirty—and wise enough to know those dreams were another girl’s.
I could borrow a lovely dress, and let Elizabeth plait my hair and rouge my cheeks, but I couldn’t unspool the years.
Catherine read something on my face and in my silence. “I’m sorry they’re not new,” she said. “We didn’t have time to have dresses made, so these are mostly last season’s fashions. But I think they will look stylish enough.” She wrung her hands. “I hope you don’t mind?”
Those hands were long-fingered, pale, the nails neatly filed. She had no calluses, I’d wager, but her knuckles were ink-stained a tawny gray.
Catherine Buckland should have been the most celebrated geomagical illustrator of our time.
She had a gift. She should have studied in Paris.
She should have apprenticed in Japan. She should have been hired in every nation, on every continent, to illustrate their artifacts.
Her name should have been as well known as her husband’s.
But she was a woman. And for all her talent, Catherine had been beautiful, too, and she’d probably worn a dress like this the day she met Buckland. And Catherine probably pinched herself for happiness, to find a husband who admired her for her mind, and talent, and did not resent it.
If I’d married Henry, I would have lived Catherine Buckland’s life.
If I had married Henry, I, too, would be the wife of a famous geomagician.
I would be a mother, surely, with children of my own.
I would have kept a home, or two, and I would manage a staff.
I would wear fine dresses, and silk slippers.
My husband would have been modern in his thinking on women’s rights.
He might have encouraged me to keep my hobbies—even to keep collecting fossils, if it brought me joy.
And I would have counted myself lucky beyond measure.
But then there would have been babies to tend, and the house to maintain, and appearances to keep, and how did it really look, after all, if a lady went clambering about the rocks? What kind of example was she setting for her children? Didn’t her husband mind?
If I’d ever had a trove of dresses like these, as a girl, or as a young bride, I wouldn’t be here now. I would have slipped into another life. I would be happy, maybe, but not great. A wife, yes. But never a geomagician.
It was a sudden freedom, to realize I didn’t want Catherine Buckland’s life, or her daughters’, either. But that didn’t mean I couldn’t appreciate a gorgeous gown.
“Thank you. They are beautiful. Truly.” I laid my hands on Catherine’s, and she relaxed with relief. “Blythe, why don’t you pick out your favorites while I wash off some of this muck.”