Chapter 32 #2
“Of course,” Lucy said. “And Mary, I am—”
I rose abruptly, not bothering to excuse myself. I stalked from the room before Lucy could catch me.
“Let her go, love,” I heard Catherine say, and I sent her a silent thanks. I didn’t want Lucy’s apology, and I certainly didn’t want to hear whatever justification she had to offer.
I was still fuming, up in my room, yanking a hairbrush through my tangles.
I suppose the Buckland girls would use their reliqs for this: a quick bit of magic to braid the hair or lace the backs of their corsets.
I’d even seen Elizabeth use her reliq to magic a bit of rosy color onto her cheeks and lips.
But I’d been too long conditioned to hoard magic to use it in such a frivolous fashion. I’d never known when I might need to sell my reliq to afford a bit of bread.
You needn’t be ashamed, Elizabeth Buckland had said. I furiously plucked strands of black hair from the brush. What did she know of that shame? What did Lucy, for that matter?
I’d done what was needed to survive. I’d fought and sacrificed and worked to get where I was. I wasn’t ashamed of anything. But that didn’t mean I wanted my life story used as part of some political narrative like something in Lucy’s Promethean pamphlets.
There was a knock at my door.
“Go away,” I snapped. “I don’t want to talk to you.”
“I know.” Lucy opened the door anyway.
“I mean it.”
She shut the door behind herself and came inside. She had a little basket in one hand, filled with bunched cloth.
“That’s too bad. Because I need to apologize.”
I whirled in my chair and crossed my arms. “And if I don’t want to hear it?”
She rolled her eyes. “Do you remember the time you accidentally suggested to Mayor Payne that I had kissed his wife?”
I winced. “I do.”
In my indignation with Lucy, I had neglected to consider that the problem with dear, longtime friendships was that you had inevitably wronged them at some previous point, which they would be sure to reference when you were very reasonably and righteously angry with them.
“And what did I say, when you tried to apologize?” Lucy put her hands on her hips.
“You told me to go eat a toad.”
“I did. And what did you do?”
A smile threatened to crack across my lips. “I went outside—”
“—and found some poor, innocent toad, and put the fat little fellow to your mouth and—”
I chuckled, despite myself. “And I made you swear to forgive me, or I would eat him.”
“Well, Blythe helped me search the garden,” Lucy said, drawing open her basket.
I gasped. “Lucy, you didn’t.”
She reached into the basket and pulled out the fattest, most indignant-looking toad I had ever seen. She twisted up her face, and raised the creature toward her lips.
I rushed to her. “Oh, ew, ew, don’t do it, that’s disgusting!”
I caught her wrist and yanked, and the toad went flying, landing with a thud on the rug. Lucy and I gasped in unison as we ran over.
Lucy scooped him up, and he ribbited solemnly, apparently none the worse for wear.
We burst into laughter, both collapsing onto the divan.
“I was wrong to tell Elizabeth,” Lucy said, wiping at tears of laughter with her free hand. “I shouldn’t have.”
The image of the toad in midair popped into my head again, and I hiccupped in laughter.
“I do forgive you. Of course I do.” I held out my arms. Lucy set the toad back in his basket, and we embraced. Her hair smelled like lavender, like the bundles she hung over the mantel in her cottage in Lyme Regis. Like home. I squeezed her tight before I let her go.
“You know,” Lucy said, as we pulled apart, “despite what her…zealousness this morning might suggest, Elizabeth would much rather work with you than me.”
“What? Me? Why?”
“Because she idolizes you.” Lucy looked at me in disbelief.
“You really didn’t know? Elizabeth’s spent her whole life hearing from her father about the wondrous Mary Anning, the prodigy of prodigies, the cleverest fossilist alive, the future of geomagic, the hope of womenkind, the light of science in the dark of ignorance.
Et cetera, et cetera.” She waved her hand.
My chest was tight. “Buckland said all that?”
“Apparently. Did you know that as a girl, Elizabeth begged for bones? So her father would catch rats and boil off the skin and meat for her, and give her the skeleton in pieces, so that she might practice fitting it back together. So that she could learn to assemble a fossil skeleton, if ever she found one. And he brought her real fossils, too, still cased in stone. So she could practice digging them free. Like you.”
“But Elizabeth’s hardly said a thing to me,” I floundered. “And nothing at all about geomagic.”
Lucy chuckled. “It may not occur to you, Mary, but not everyone is quite so bold as you. It can be difficult for some people to march up to their heroes and tell them you’d like to speak with them about, I don’t know, pleasasaur bones.”
“Plesiosaur.”
Lucy groaned as she laughed. “Just, maybe you could speak to her? Then perhaps she will stop whining that you think she has brains of cotton.”
I stammered that I didn’t think Elizabeth had brains of cotton.
Lucy looked skeptical.
I reached for her hand. “I mean it. She picked you, didn’t she?” Lucy’s neck flushed pink, climbing to her ears. I didn’t need to tell Lucy to be careful. She knew the risks of a romance with a well-bred young lady; the ruin it could bring to Elizabeth’s reputation, and her own.
And if she had to choose between my secrets or Elizabeth’s, which would she keep?
The realization was painful, but clear. I couldn’t tell Lucy the truth. Not about the reanimations, or the tanks of ancient creatures at Henry’s house. Not about Henry’s theory of magic, or even that I was some kind of witch with a special affinity for fossils.
The toad interrupted my thoughts with an unhappy ribbit, and I plastered on a smile.
“I’ll speak with Elizabeth. I promise.”
“Thank you. Now, come on,” Lucy said, picking up the basket. “I told Blythe she could feed him a cricket before we put him back under the roses.”