Chapter 19 #2
“Yes, yes. That’s precisely the benefit of the manifold reliqs,” Edgar added eagerly. “As I explained to you earlier, the combined—”
Lucy put up a palm. “I don’t want another lecture on the schematics of your little machine.”
“The Loom is a very large machine, actually.” Henry tipped his glass cheekily.
Edgar groaned. “You’re not helping.”
“I want you—both of you”—Lucy’s glare swept over Henry—“to consider whether this is really a good idea. Right, Mary?”
I was too slow to respond, apparently, because Lucy’s face fell. I could see why she was upset, but I couldn’t muster quite the same outrage.
“My dear Luce,” Edgar said gently, taking her arm. “As I was just saying to Mary, good is really a question of proportion. And the manifold reliq Looms provide a scalable solution to free the poor from reliance on the slicks.”
Lucy let her brother guide her back to the greenhouse door, but the furrow between her brows only deepened.
We returned to the patio, where Buckland was holding court. Even here in the house of his rival, he was loose and loud. Wine sloshed in his glass as he told some joke and the geomagicians around him laughed.
“I invite the professor to these receptions every time, you know, but this is the first one he’s attended in years,” Henry said, low enough that Edgar and Lucy didn’t hear.
“I wish I had known,” he continued, “that to step out of his shadow would mean the end of our friendship.”
I knew it was manipulation, but still, I heard the ring of truth in his words.
“Come,” Henry said when I didn’t respond, “I should not monopolize your time, as I know there are others who are very eager to speak with you.”
He led us toward a cluster of geomagicians near the enchanted self-pouring champagne.
I recognized the warm smile of Elias Goldsmild, and blushed at an eager wave from red-haired Gideon Mantell.
Young Samuel Enys was trying to hide his dislike, but poorly, and the Thomases, Whaley and Reed, were indifferent to me, but were sharply focused on Henry’s every word.
I was introduced to Charles Lyell and to Archibald Taylor.
“Mr. Lyell, I am so looking forward to reviewing your new book. And Mr. Taylor! I read your recent plesiosaur paper. I was hoping you would be here.”
Taylor preened. “You enjoyed it, I hope?”
Lucy coughed and pinched my arm, and I swallowed down my first response. I’d already made an enemy of Enys, clearly—it would be best not to make another.
“Oh, I thoroughly enjoyed annotating it,” I said, which was true, but left Taylor with a baffled expression.
I noticed, with a mixture of alarm and pride, as the other geomagicians peeled from Buckland’s crowd to join our circle.
“Would you like to see, Miss Anning?” asked Samuel Enys, loudly interrupting as Henry introduced me to a stooped, white-haired geomagician he called Mr. Lawson. “They’re very expensive; I doubt you’ve had many chances to examine one.”
“Examine what?” I asked curiously, turning from Mr. Lawson.
Thomas Whaley, with whom Enys had been speaking, waved a hand and said, “I was only showing Mr. Enys my new bezoar. Recently retrieved from an ichthyosaur skeleton, in Charmouth.”
I managed not to snort. “A bezoar, you say?”
Bezoar stones, found in animal intestines, were once believed to counter any poison. I’d read that for a while in the Middle Ages, goat-stomach bezoars were the most popular reliq for the upper class.
True bezoars are caused when an animal swallows some nonorganic material like a pebble, and the stomach reacts by coating the material with layers of calcium and phosphate. But this was no true bezoar.
“I’d love to see it,” I said.
Whaley presented his treasure on a silk scarf with a flourish. Enys looked smug. There were admiring sounds all around.
“So dark!” someone said. “Dark as pitch.”
“Or ink,” I mumbled, which perhaps wasn’t polite. But none of them seemed to notice. Buckland wasn’t around to give me a warning look, and Lucy didn’t know enough to know she ought to.
Whaley said he would be taking it to the slicks soon, to be turned into a reliq. I bit the inside of my cheek.
“May I hold it?”
Whaley was clearly reluctant, but he let me pick it up from the silk and turn it over in my hands.
Sometimes these were mistaken for petrified fir tree cones.
But I’d pulled enough from the intestines of ichthyosaur skeletons to know it.
Like the other “bezoars” I’d examined, this one was long and cylindrical, roughly cone-shaped.
“Would you like me to tell you what it is?” I asked, handing it back to Whaley.
“I know a bezoar when I see one,” Whaley snapped, as Enys scoffed openly.
“Have you ever cut one open?”
He scoffed. “Why would I do that?”
“Hmm. Very well.”
The other geomagicians looked between us, loyalty to Whaley warring with curiosity. Henry cocked his head but said nothing. A smile played over his lips.
“Well, I want to know,” said Elias Goldsmild.
I shrugged. “I think I must defer to Mr. Whaley.”
“Fine,” he snapped. “What do you think it is, Miss Anning, if not a bezoar?”
It was difficult to keep the glee from my voice. Lucy tried to pinch me, but it couldn’t be helped.
“Why, it’s feces, Mr. Whaley.”
Henry burst into laughter, and he wasn’t alone. Edgar snorted. Samuel Enys gasped, but then began to giggle wildly. Whaley’s face was a rapidly ripening tomato.
“We can cut it open,” I said, “if you’d like to see. You’ll almost certainly find small fish bones. And the black color is, I believe, from the ink of belemnites that the ichthyosaur consumed. My own studies suggest they were a regular part of the ichthyosaur diet.
“See, Mr. Whaley,” I said—in all earnestness—“just think of all we can learn about the ichthyosaur’s diet from your ‘bezoar.’ ”
Whaley seethed, his eye twitching, but Goldsmild asked if I had interest in collaborating on a paper about the subject. And apparently Enys had forgiven me, too, because he suggested we find a mallet right away to open up the bezoar with haste.