The Dragon in the Cliff Read online

  The Dragon in the Cliff

  A Novel Based on the Life of Mary Anning

  Sheila Cole

  Drawings by T. C. Farrow

  TO MICHAEL,

  who knows how to make dreams come true

  CONTENTS

  Preface

  I Am Lost

  How I Started

  Chapel School

  The Turning Point

  The Curiosities Will Save Us

  A Costly Mistake

  Our Losses

  Something Stares at Me From the Cliff

  An Accident Leads to a Discovery

  New Places, Uncomfortable Thoughts

  Disappointed Expectations

  A Chance Meeting

  A Stolen Fossil

  Joseph Takes Matters into His Own Hands

  The End of a Friendship

  Hopes, Dreams, and a Lonely Reality

  A Great Distance Between Us

  A Demeaning First Meeting

  Others Get the Credit

  A Geological Tea Party

  An Understanding

  Epilogue

  PREFACE

  Although The Dragon in the Cliff is a work of fiction, it is based on the fragmentary facts available about a real person and the place and time in which she lived. Mary Anning was, in fact, the first person to discover the fossil of an entire marine dinosaurlike creature. She made this discovery in 1812 when she was thirteen years old. At that time the sciences of geology and paleontology were in their infancies and the existence of dinosaurs was as yet unknown. Scientists were just beginning to accumulate evidence that species evolve, putting in jeopardy long-held beliefs about the special place that human beings occupy in the natural world.

  Finding the remains of a giant dinosaurlike creature would be exciting under any circumstances. But finding them under the circumstances of Mary Anning’s life is a drama of a very special kind. Mary Anning lived at a time when women were excluded from scientific activity even if they came from well-to-do families. The fact that Mary Anning was not only female, but that she came from a poor family in a small town and still managed to contribute to the scientific work of her time is what makes her achievements so remarkable. It was in trying to imagine what it must have been like for her to have made such a discovery and how it affected her life that I came to write this book.

  Sheila Cole

  Solana Beach, California

  January 2, 1990

  I AM LOST

  Outside my shop everything is quiet. All of Lyme, from the high to the low, are in their beds. All except me, and I cannot sleep. My brain is feverish from thinking about what has happened and what I should do. There is no one I can talk to about this, not even Mama. No one would understand, not my old friends, certainly, and not the geological gentlemen who are my patrons. I am alone, cut off from everyone, different from everyone, belonging nowhere. I am lost except for the fossils. To others they are only cold stones, the petrified remains of animals long dead, but to me they are so much more—my livelihood—but even more than that, my passion and the reason for everything—my difference, my isolation, and my joy. Would I be like the other girls in Lyme if I gave up fossils? Could I give them up? I don’t even know. I am lost. Perhaps if I begin at the beginning I will understand how I came to be caught between two worlds and know better what I should do.

  HOW I STARTED

  There are people in Lyme who say that it isn’t the fossils that made me different from others, but the lightning. On the nineteenth of August, in the year 1800, when I was fifteen months old, there was awful thunder and terrible lightning that made all of Lyme wonder.

  The way it is told, a company of horsemen came to give a riding exhibition in a field near town. Elizabeth Haskings, who was watching after me, took me there so that she could see the jumping. A thunderstorm broke out not long after the crowd assembled and everyone scattered. With me in her arms, Elizabeth ran for shelter under a large elm. Fannie Fowler and Martha Drower also took shelter under the tree. There was a bolt of lightning and a terrible clap of thunder, the loudest ever heard. After a minute, a man saw the group lying motionless under the tree and called the alarm. Upon arriving at the elm, they found the girls dead.

  I appeared to be dead as well. I was taken from Elizabeth Haskings’s arms and carried to my parents’ home. My parents were told to put me in warm water and by so doing revived me. People say that from that day on I was livelier and brighter than others in Lyme. That is why they credit the lightning for my being different and being able to discover the stone monster. They even say that is why I am able to talk to the cleverest scientists in England, though I am only a girl and am uneducated.

  I don’t think it was the lightning that set me on a different path. I believe it all began with Papa and his “curiosities.” That is what people in Lyme call fossils. Papa would go down to the beach to collect them every spare moment he had. Mama did not approve. “It’s foolishness,” she would say. “A waste of time. You are a cabinetmaker, Richard.”

  Papa would answer Mama patiently, “Molly, we have been at war with Napoleon for years now and there’s a blockade which is ruining better men than I. I don’t have many new orders for furniture these days and those old stones, as you call them, bring in money.”

  Papa’s answer would quiet Mama for a while, for she knew as well as he that travelers on the coach from Bath and visitors who came to bathe in the sea and stroll along the shore stopped at the little table outside the cabinet shop to buy Papa’s curiosities.

  Papa started to take Joseph to the beach with him when Joseph was nine years old. Of course, I wanted to go, too. I wanted to do whatever my brother did. “It isn’t fair,” I would protest. “Why can Joseph go and not me? I’m almost as big as he is.” Standing on the tips of my toes, I would add, “Bigger than John and Ann. They’re just babies, and I’m going to be seven.”

  “We’re not going to the beach to play, Mary. I’m teaching Joseph so that he can help me,” Papa would say, putting an end to my pleading until the next time.

  One day I was not to be put off as easily as usual. I pulled at Papa’s arm as he put on the old coat he wore to go collecting and begged to be taken along, promising, “I’ll help. I’ll be good.”

  Mama pulled me from him roughly, saying “Enough! Mary, you can help me here. There is no water for washing up. Go fetch some and be quick about it.”

  I took the yoke with the buckets, but instead of going to the pump, I followed Papa and Joseph up the Butter Market and down Long Entry, past the baths, keeping a safe distance behind them for fear of angering Papa. Oh, how I wanted to go curiosity hunting! Though, the truth is, I had little idea of what that meant. It was enough for me that Papa liked to do it and that he always came home with his face aglow from the sun and the wind and with exciting new curiosities to show us. Now Joseph was going, but not me. I watched jealously as the two figures, one tall and thin with a gray sack slung over his back, and one smaller with a blue cap, made their way down the steep path to the beach below. Then I turned back toward the pump. After filling the buckets, I struggled home under their weight.

  The morning dragged on forever while I did my chores. I braided rushes for a new rug, listening all the while for the door of the shop downstairs to open. As soon as I heard it, I dropped the rushes and ran downstairs to the shop calling, “Let me see what you found. Let me see.” I pulled the curiosity basket from Joseph’s hand and immediately started to empty it. “Did you find this?” I asked, holding up a sea lily, with its delicate branches and flowers.

  “Papa found that one. I found this one,” he said. His long, oval face was unusually serious and important as he showed me a bullet-shaped curiosity. “P
apa says it’s called a thunderbolt.”

  “Is it really a thunderbolt, from the sky? Tell me, Papa!”

  “No, my dear,” Papa replied, “it only looks like a thunderbolt. It’s a curiosity.”

  “Was it a living creature once?”

  “They say it was.”

  “What kind of creature?”

  “I don’t know, my little monkey. No living creature I know of looks like that.”

  “Where did you find this one?” I asked, holding up another curiosity.

  In the midst of my questions I was called away to watch the little ones while Mama set out the soup and bread for dinner. But as soon as I could, I stole downstairs to the cabinet shop again where Papa was at work on the lathe. I picked the fossils up one by one. “Papa,” I shouted over the noise of the lathe, “Where did you find this one?”

  Seeing that I was trying to say something, Papa removed his foot from the pedal so that he could hear me. I repeated my question, he started the lathe up again, shouting the answer as he turned the wooden block on the machine.

  With all the shouting, it didn’t take long before Mama called me away again. When I came upstairs, she glowered at me. “Your Papa is working and you are stopping him with foolish questions. What a bothersome child! I can’t understand what has gotten into you.”

  Though usually I was sensitive to a scolding, Mama’s cross words that day had little effect. I was determined to learn everything that Joseph knew about curiosities and to be useful to Papa, too. That afternoon I went down to the shop again to sit at Papa’s side while he cleaned the new finds. “Can I do one?” I asked.

  “You must have a light, sure hand or you’ll break the curiosity. Sit here and watch. You can brush away the bits and pieces of mud and shale I pry off with my needle,” Papa said.

  I picked up the brush and watched as Papa worked the needle, carefully lifting the softer stone from the harder curiosity. “Papa, do you think someday I’ll be a help?” Papa continued prying away the softer stone. “You are a help now, Mary. You run errands and you don’t forget. You do your chores, you help Mama with the little ones, and soon you will learn to make lace. Mama depends upon you,” he said without looking up.

  I cocked my head and brought it low so that it was on a level with his. “Papa, that’s not what I mean. I mean a help to you with the curiosities. Helping Mama with the chores is dull.”

  He put down the needle, stood up, and patted my head. “Dull or not, they must be done, Mary. We all have dull things to do.” He went over to the box on the floor where he kept his finds and began to search through it.

  “But hunting for curiosities isn’t dull. It’s like a game,” I said after a minute.

  Papa looked up from the box. His pale blue eyes took me in appraisingly. A smile slowly spread across his face, but he did not answer.

  I remember my first fossil-hunting expedition as if it were yesterday. One day not long after I started to help Papa prepare the curiosities, when I was pleading as usual to be allowed to go to the beach with Papa and Joseph, Papa suddenly turned to Mama and asked, “Molly, don’t you think we might let her come along?”

  “Richard, whatever are you thinking?” Mama replied. “Girls don’t belong down on the beach.”

  “Only this once, Molly. When she sees how dirty and rough it is, she won’t want to come again. She’ll be happy to stay home with her knitting and the little ones.”

  “I need her to keep them from getting underfoot so I can get my own work done,” Mama objected.

  “Just this once,” Papa said.

  I was in my cloak and wooden clogs and out the door before Mama had a chance to protest. I was going to find something magnificent and prove to Mama and Papa that I should be allowed to go curiosity hunting!

  It was early. The town and the surrounding hills were shrouded in wet, gray mist, closing us into the small world of the shore. We walked along, glad to be out in the sharp salt air with the sound of the waves in our ears.

  No sooner did we approach the cliffs of Black Ven than Papa began our lesson. “Joseph, where is the tide?” he asked.

  “It’s going out, Papa,” Joseph replied, glancing over his shoulder at me with a self-satisfied look.

  “Yes, and that is the time to go curiosity hunting, when the tide is going out. Then you have plenty of time to do your work. You must always keep an eye on the tide and be sure to leave the beach in plenty of time before it is high again.”

  “Papa, you once forgot,” I reminded him.

  “Yes, and I’m thankful that I’m here to tell the tale. I was hammering right over there on a rock to break out a curiosity, when suddenly I realized that the sea was lapping at my feet. The beach on either side of me was underwater and in a short time I would have been underwater, too, if I hadn’t climbed the cliff.”

  Joseph and I looked up at the wall of Lias cliffs with their layer upon layer of rock and dirt. It seemed impossible to us that anyone could climb to the top. Only an occasional bush or tuft of grass softened their almost perpendicular ascent from the beach. I squeezed Papa’s hand, glad that he had escaped and certain that I would never, never forget about the tide.

  We walked on to the far end of Black Ven. “We’ll work the slide today,” Papa said, pointing at a dark mound located at the foot of the cliff. “It’s in slides like that one that I often find the best curiosities. It’s easier than trying to get curiosities out of the cliff. That’s hard work and it is dangerous. But if you have the patience to wait and let storms break down the edges of the cliff, then half your work is done for you.”

  The slide, which hadn’t looked very big from a distance, turned out to be a mound taller than Papa and several yards wide. What looked like dirt was actually a mixture of limestone, shale, clay, and dirt.

  Papa and Joseph put down the tool bags and the curiosity basket, and I suddenly realized that I didn’t have any tools. “What shall I do?” I asked Papa. “I have no hammer or chisel.”

  “There are many curiosities to be found in a slide like this that are already free. If you find one that needs breaking out of the rock, we’ll help you.”

  I looked carefully at the slide, picking up bits and pieces of limestone and shale, turning them over to see if they contained anything, and tossing them aside, trying to find something that would impress Joseph and Papa.

  The first one to find something was Papa, who called us over to look at a golden-colored stone disc with a pattern like a tightly coiled rope.

  “It’s a golden snail,” Joseph said.

  “It’s not gold and it’s not a snail,” Papa corrected him. “It’s an ammonite and it’s only fool’s gold. See, it’s not yellow like gold, but a brassy color. It should fetch a pretty penny. People like ammonites and this is a nice-sized one.”

  “How did the curiosity become yellow like that?” I asked Papa as he wrapped the ammonite in rags that he had brought from home.

  “I’m not certain, my dear. Somehow the metal must have replaced the ammonite’s hard shell. But how, I do not know.”

  Now I wanted to find a fool’s gold ammonite, too. But the first thing I found was not golden at all. It was a gray stone disc bigger than the palm of my hand, hollowed out in the middle with a ridge protruding from one side.

  Joseph glanced over at it. “A verteberrie. Throw it away, Mary.”

  I thought he was just being spiteful. I made a face at him and took the curiosity to Papa, who was splitting a piece of rock open with his hammer and chisel.

  “Oh, that’s a nice one,” Papa said. “Too bad the travelers don’t buy them.” Seeing how disappointed I was, he added, “But the collectors are always interested in them. Perhaps Miss Philpot will want it for her collection. Wrap it up well so it doesn’t break and put it in the basket, Mary.”

  “What is it, Papa?” I asked.

  “Part of the backbone of an animal.”

  “What kind of an animal?”

  “No one knows, my dear,
but from the looks of it, it must have been a big one, a very big one, I’d say.”

  “Has anyone ever found all the parts to a creature like that?”

  “No, but if you keep looking, perhaps you will.”

  Joseph called to us excitedly. He had found something. He climbed down the slide and handed me an irregular slab of gray rock to look at. On the rock, delicately outlined in reddish brown, was a small fish. Once it had been a fish that swam in the sea, but now it was a faint impression in a piece of rock. How strange! How wonderfully strange it was to hold a once-upon-a-time fish in your hand.

  Joseph’s brown eyes glowed with pride when he took the fish from me to show Papa. I went back to my hunting determined to find something valuable, too, anything that would convince Papa to let me come again. I looked at the dirt and rocks in front of me, searching for a sign, something that would tell me that a curiosity was there. I pulled the rocks out of the mound and looked at them with even more care than before to make certain that I missed nothing. But I only managed to find another thunderbolt before Papa called for us to stop. “The tide is well on its way in, children. See how high the water is on the Cobb,” he said, pointing to the breakwater and harbor.

  I was quiet as we walked back. “See here,” Papa said, pointing to a section of the cliff. “That rock might give way if there is another storm. I tell you, that’ll be a rich place to hunt. We should find some real beauties if we get down to the beach before the slide is washed away by the sea.” I glanced at where he pointed and turned away. It really was no concern of mine. I hadn’t been useful. I would have to stay home with Mama and the little ones.

  “You did very well,” Papa said, patting Joseph on the back. “It’s a lucky day when you find a fish. Squire Henley will want to see it. It should go for a good price. You really are learning.” Then, noticing my silence, and guessing at my unhappiness, he said, “Don’t be discouraged, Mary. Maybe next time you’ll find the entire beast and not just the verteberrie.”